Hitman: Absolution has two. In "Rosewood", you can rescue a man being tortured by a pair of Wade's men, and in the "Attack of the Saints" mission, where you can save the hotel manager from being executed by the search team, and have him profusely thank you in response.

Pandora's Tower has Elena. You can keep her company, chat with her, give her gifts, and in exchange she will make medicine and translate the documents you find, even if you do nothing of the above.Also, even though beating a boss resets the progress of her curse, you really don't want to see what happens to her if you let the meter drop below red because you really had to finish the dungeon in one run.Even though you can easily heal her back, the moment is still heart-wrenching.

ADOM: You get this message even if your character is a bloodthirsty trollish berserker or dark elf necromancer:

The cute dog attacks the ogre. The cute dog misses the ogre. The ogre attacks the cute dog. The cute dog is killed! You are direly saddened about the death of the cute dog.

NetHack is similar to ADOM with: "The spell hits the <monster>! The <monster> is killed! The spell hits Rex! Poor Rex is killed! Heartbreaking...

Cannon Fodder is particularly mean with this. Each and every one of your 200+ soldiers is individually named, with their ranks and kills, and any soldier surviving a mission will be promoted; those who don't survive are recalled by name at the end of each level, and possibly added to the honours board. The first four - Jools, Jops, Stoo and RJ - are beloved by game players everywhere; they're also ShoutOuts to the main game developers. And you will give everything to try and keep them alive, because that Lost In Service list scrolling up between the poppies is devastating. The game satirises pretty much every single last one of the Military and Warfare Tropes. Oh, and all the characters are about nine pixels high.

Not to mention that the screen between missions is a war cemetery featuring a little grave stone for each man you have lost. In the foreground a long, winding line of men queue up for the chance to give their lives for your cause. The more casualties you take, the more men need to be admitted.

Cave Storyhas an NPC named Curly who sacrifices her life to save yours. But if you do exactly the right things, you can save her. Incidentally, this is the only way to access a bonus level and the best ending.

The semi-sentient AI population, Darwinians, in Introversion's Darwinia. Though, if you move fast enough you can 'revive' them endlessly, unless they get annihilated by a Soul Destroyer, in which case they leave saddening ghostly echoes of their bodies behind. And then there's the Biosphere level, where most of the methods of winning involve sending wave upon wave of the cute little guys against their virus-corrupted kin. Made worse because the Darwinians are voiced by one of the developers' pet cat and meow very sweetly as they die.

The Godfather the game. You can get away with blasting a few innocent citizens, but every single person has a name that you somehow know. It's not so fun seeing Eduardo Mellini bleeding out in the middle of Fifth and Ten. Occasionally they will also shout things like "Don't do this! I have a wife and kids!"

Made worse by their lack of survival instincts! GET OUT OF THE WAY, SAL! THERE'S A HIGH SPEED CHASE TAKING PLACE HERE!

Also, the security guards at banks. They're not even mob affiliated, they're just doing their jobs! For the small banks, you can get away with robbing it and not killing any of them. Doesn't work for the big banks....

There's also your Corleone allies who always help you out whenever they see you in trouble, and the guys you hire to help take down enemy strongholds. It's rather sad to see them get killed in action on your behalf.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The nameless Grove Street mooks you pick up to assist in missions will chatter with C.J. on the way to the goal, giving him shit like all his named friends. Makes it hard to watch them mowed down like wheat. Of course it doesn't help they tend to fire wildly at every cop that comes by.

An even better example is this story of a four-year-old whose father let him play San Andreas, only to discover that the innocent kid used the Wide Open Sandbox potential to arrest criminals, help firefighters, and drive the wounded to the hospital in an ambulance, refusing to steal any cars or drive recklessly because that would be wrong.

ICO is all about this. You spend the entire game worrying about how Yorda is doing. Her ability to open doors certainly helps as well.

The first time Ico calls her across a gap she can't possibly leap, and she jumps anyway, trusting Ico to catch her and pull her up.

Although still images don't do it justice, you can get a good idea of the heart-in-throat moments from this picture◊.

Heck, Ico calling for Yorda and leading her by the hand through hordes of Dark Spirits. Or Ico fighting his way through those hordes to pull her out of their grasp with all the ferocity a ten-year-old boy can muster.

All of this is made even more interesting because Yorda speaks an unknown language; Ico (and the player) haven't a clue what she's saying, and they have to communicate via body language. That she's so darned important to you when you can't even understand her is impressive, to say the least.

It's safe to say that the developers pulled this off well enough that there's plenty of people with fond memories of the game despite most of it being one giant Escort Mission, which are normally the bane of many a gamer.

Of course, the main inspiration for Ico was Another World, which has a similar caring relationship with a mute alien who looks exactly the same as your average mook. But it's easy to forget this when you run down a corridor from a deadly laser cannon and are about to be cornered by enemies you have no hope of defeating, only for him to reach a hand out to you from a hatch above. And then there's the ending...

Surprisingly, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction of all games has this trope. If you press the special button (Y in the Nintendo GameCube version) while holding someone Hulk normally slams them into the ground. But if you do so while holding a civilian, Hulk just puts them down gently and pats them on the head.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, for the N64. You have to complete a sidequest which revolves around reuniting a separated couple because the man, Kafei, has been cursed to become a child. Part of the quest has Kafei give you an item called the Pendent of Memories to give to Anju, which when shown, will convince her to stay in the inn during the last few hours until the Moon falls on Clock Town and wait for Kafei to return. The player can choose to not show Anju the pendent, and then help Kafei get back his Sun Mask. By doing so, Anju will not be waiting in the inn when Kafei arrives at the inn, as she had fled to Romani Ranch, causing Kafei to look at Anju's wedding dress and laments that he could not keep his promise to Anju.

It helps to remember that every character will only experience the True Ending, since Link will reset time until he gets it right.

Romani. Dear god, Romani. Until the player gets the Goron Mask (enabling them to blow up the boulder blocking the path to the Ranch on the first and second days), showing up at the ranch on the Final Day, you'll find Romani sitting outside the barn, traumatised and catatonic. Turns out the 'Ghosts' that abduct the cows on the night of the first day did... something... to her. Cremia's horror at what has happened only increases the desire to help Romani.

The entire game is based around manipulating this trope. Termina is a world as alien to Link as it is to the player. By the end of the game, his burgeoning care for the people of Termina is mirrored by the player's growing familiarity with the world and its problems.

Fusing Kinstones with a man who lives in the town in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap will result in a portal appearing that takes you to the bedroom of an old man you've never met before. There's a ghost circling around him that only you can see, slowly killing him. You can use your Gust Jar to remove the ghost and heal the old man. Later in the game, you learn that the old man is a member of the Wind Tribe, and he'll give you a new weapon as thanks for saving his life.

Subverted with Cawlin who asks you to deliver a love letter to a classmate, or give it to a disembodied hand in a toilet. If you give it to the classmate, she rejects him and he balls up in his bed, crying. If you give it to the hand, the same scenario will play, but the hand falls in love with him.

In The Legend of Zelda Oracle games, a young farming couple asks Link to name their newborn. At various stages of the game, you can give them advice and money to help raise the youngster, and by the end of the game he's a young adult ready to make his way in the world. There's also a strange deconstruction: If you're too generous with the Rupees, the child will become a spoiled ne'er do well with no interest in work.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has numerous examples, but some of the most noteworthy include helping a young Sheikah girl learn how to cook her dead mother's recipes, gathering people from across Hyrule to build a new community (including two of them who end up getting married), and helping the wandering minstrel Kass figure out the meaning behind the land's ancient songs so that he can return to his family and fulfill his teacher's last wish to help out the legendary hero.

One of the sweetest aspects of the game is helping someone who's fighting with monsters. Even if it's as trivial as a Bokoblin, or as dangerous as a Lynel, you'll likely drop everything, rush in, and kick the monster's ass. And whoever is in trouble will thank you immensely. You may be a hero of Hyrule, but that's no reason to not look out for the little guy.

Ōkami allows the player, in their role as a benevolent goddess, to perform good deeds ranging from making trees and flowers bloom to finding water for reservoirs to battling demons. One good deed was to buy some charcoal for a little girl to play with- AWWW!

If you use the Bloom power on friendly NPCs, they cheer up and pet you.

Feeding the animals gives you a little cutscene of them eating. Afterward they'll have little hearts floating around when they see you.

In fact, Okami breathes this trope. As a benevolent goddess, you earn Praise (for leveling up) not just by heroic deeds and beating the bad guys, but by feeding those animals, making trees bloom, turning dead land into fertile ground, and taking other totally non-violent actions to simply improve people's lives. It restores life and a sense of wonder to the world, enhancing your divine strength.

But in your own hour of need, will they remember you? Yes they will, and you just might weep.

Overlord can enter into this at times - your Minions are ultra-expendable, but the basic (brown) ones can pick up pieces of equipment from fallen enemies... (actually, they all can, but while the other variants just get generic graphical upgrades that reflect how good their equipment is, you can actually SEE what the Browns are carrying). Since certain pieces of equipment are unique, gained from defeating specific bosses or one-time-only encounters - or just plain rare - you can easily end up wanting to protect the one who's wearing a golden crown and wielding a giant fondue fork, partially because they're unique and powerful items (which will be lost for good if he dies) and partially because they serve as souvenirs of an interesting boss-fight.

Of course, some of them can also become valued simply for comedic value, such as the one wearing a tophat and wielding a bouquet of flowers, or the one wearing a full beard (the previous owner didn't need it anymore).

The sequel encourages players to keep their minions alive more, since the Minions now have names, personalities, manageable equipment, mounts, levels, and the ability to raise favorites from the dead at a graveyard. However as an Evil Overlord you're mainly motivated by the fact that you don't want powerful Minions carrying special equipment such as BFSes, Gladiator Helmets or one-of-a-kind hats to go to waste.

Course in the sequel if you really care about your favourite Minion you can bring him back to life. At a cost, to save a level 10 Minion for example will require you to kill 20 in trade.

Losing Pikmin can cause players to feel bad. Something about their screams is upsetting, and then there are those water vapour ghosts to remind you how badly you let them all down. It's even worse if you just leave some behind after dark. Not to mention they're basically dying for capitalism in the second game.

Also, in the first game, Olimar himself, as an extension of the player, becomes attached to the little critters, as evidenced in his log entries. He amusedly notes their various quirks as the days go by, and he berates himself if they get caught in a bomb blast or if the Pikmin race dies out.

GLaDOS spends an entire level in Portal trying to make the player bond with the Companion Cube, only to tell you at the end of the level that you must euthanize it by tossing it into a furnace in order to complete the test * Although the ending of the sequel shows that it survived. She brings this up at the end of the game when you fight her, admonishing you for killing your "best friend." After praising you for being the quickest of all test subjects to do so, no less.

In the sequel, you encounter a turret-bot reclamation facility that is called "The Turret Redemption Line." Among the piles of scrapped turrets, there is one that was scrapped because it won't kill, easily spotted due to its active laser sight. If you pick it up and carry it off, it says "Thank you" in that strangely endearing robotic voice. You even get an achievement for saving it.

Generally, the turrets talk to the player in a very endearing way. "Please put me down,", "Where are you?" and "Good night," are all great examples of this. And then you remember that they're trying to kill you...

The first level of Psychonauts gives you the option of escorting Dogan across a mine field safely in the very first level. As long as you don't go too far ahead, it's pretty easy, you get a few arrowheads, and you feel like you've just started on your way to become a hero. Then he explodes. (Well, his mental personification explodes. If it helps, Dogan probably wanted to leave Coach Oleander's mind anyway.)

There are also articles of emotional luggage scattered throughout all the mental levels. They are all so sad and crying because they miss their tags...yeah...and, oh, so lovely rejoice when you reunite them.

It's not hard for fixing Fred, Gloria, and Edgar to end up feeling like a personal responsibility. They start off more funny than anything but interesting, then you get to know them personally and you're bound to really get attached to at least one of them, and from there you gradually find out the rest. Sometimes it's easy to forget you're doing this to get a Plot Coupon because the satisfaction of helping them seems a better reward.

In Shadow of the Colossus, the trusty steed named Agro helps the player get from point A to point B. The player eventually bonds with her. Heartbreaking when after riding across a collapsing bridge, Agro throws you safely to the other side before falling to her death...only for you to find out during the credits that she is still alive, but with a broken leg.

Sadistically, the game manages to make you care about practically every other Colossus you kill. This doesn't keep you from being pulled along, with the character, on his grim path, or being perversely thrilled by the challenge even while knowing you will be devastated by your own actions in a moment.

Some of them you can't feel bad for killing, like that damned boar, but yes, about half of them make you feel like you've destroyed something ancient and majestic.

Go up to Agro without a weapon out (with your hand showing as the cursor) and tap the attack button. Wander will stroke his horse's flank lovingly. No reason, just a sign he cares about his mount.

In Shadow of Destiny, the player can take the time to fetch a kitten and let a small girl adopt it. There's no reward for doing so, just giving a child a kitten.

The point of Yoshi's Island to babysit Mario, and being Mario of course you want to protect him...but if he ever gets knocked off Yoshi you'll either want to kill him yourself or redouble your efforts to not get hit if ONLY to not hear that crying again. Yoshi's Island DS adds Baby Peach, Donkey Kong, Wario and Bowser to the mix... you can probably guess who has the LEAST tolerable sounds.

Scarface: The World Is Yours. Some of the mooks that will fight by your side get unique conversations with Tony; a nice bit of character development. Of course, the fact that they kick so many kinds of ass will also inspire the desire to keep them alive. See how many missions you can do with the same minion!

In addition, Tony Montana himself invokes this trope: If you try to fire on civilians unprovoked, he simply refuses to respond to the players press of the trigger button, muttering to himself things like "Naw, I ain't gonna do that, mang."

This happens once or twice in the introductory level of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. If you act quickly enough, you can save the lives of various Galactic Federation marines when the GFS Olympus comes under attack by Space Pirates. You'll receive a reward for saving one in particular, who is injured and firing at his aggressors from behind a crate.

Saving the Etecoons and Dachora in Super Metroid is a completely optional and easily missable event. Once you learn that it exists, though, good luck finding the urge to ignore their plight unless you're specifically doing a speedrun.

In the Sonic Adventure games for the Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube, the player can partake in a mini-game to raise Chao, which are essentially tiny (and cute) alien-like creatures. Powerups acquired in the main game can be brought back to 'Chao World', and used to raise the chao's stats and change their appearance, among other things. The joy a player gets when their Chao evolve from a baby to their next form is hard to reproduce. The mini-game can also be a source of cruelty potential, if you're really feeling sadistic.

He also sounded very pleased at the end when Wonderland is restored along with all the characters and Alice is finally able to leave the asylum... You can't blame him!

All of Burning Dog Face's videos have a bit of this trope. He generally goes for the villains with the most morally questionable or cruel behaviour first, and leaves the ones with more sympathetic motives until last.

The AI partners in Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 aren't good for much aside from distracting enemy aces. However, it feels good to help out your partners and hear them express their gratitude. Mission Mode encourages you to do this, as having friendly relations with other pilots can unlock bonus missions, and there's even a set of missions specifically for improving relations with them. Conversely, when you're on opposite sides with the character you like, they'll express horror and rage when they see you're their enemy now and thoroughly guilt-trip you. To top it off, Kamille's path in Mission Mode allows you to reverse the Downer Ending of Z Gundam by saving Henken, the Radish, and Emma.

Assassin's Creed II uses this to build up the Player Punch, by having you spend the first hour interacting with Ezio's family. This includes defending his sister's honor against a philandering boyfriend, doing favors for his sick little brother and his mother, and in general getting across the message that the Auditore are a very close and caring family. Later on there's a Quick Time Event that allows you to hug Leonardo da Vinci, who at this point is Ezio's best friend. Players have been known to go back and reload a previous save if they miss the prompt for the hug the first time.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood allows the player to build up a crew of assassins that you recruit from the oppressed citizenry. You can outfit them with kit and send them out on missions. Also, destroying the Borgia oppression leads to the revitalization of Rome, and eventually The Renaissance.

As you progress through the game, the background chatter of Non Player Characters will include statements like "things are really getting better" and "there will be a special throne in Hell for Cesare Borgia when this is all over."

Assassin's Creed III has Connor interacting with members of the Homestead in various ways. From assisting Myriam in hunting a rare animal at the risk of your own life, to delivering a farming couple's baby, to assisting Norris win Myriam's affections, to rushing to defend the newest resident from her abusive husband, you will grow to love and care for these residents as if they were one of your own friendly neighbours you'd chat with over the fence.

In the last part of the first God of War, in a very intense battle, you must protect your wife and daughter from an army of Kratos. If they get hurt, you can heal them, by sacrificing your own health.

You could say one objective of Dead Rising 2 is all about this. You play as Chuck Greene whose daughter, Katey was bitten by a zombie, to prevent her transformation into one of the walking dead, she requires a shot of Zombrex every 24 hours. Seeing how this is...well, Dead Rising, it's another thing you have to neatly fit into your schedule. You have to find Zombrex while finding the truth, then also administer a shot to save her. It's really easy to start caring for little Katey, you can even bring her gifts for experience points and achievements! However, you CAN ignore this fact and let her die, since this is...well, Dead Rising, but it condemns you to Ending F, which ends on an absolutely tragic note, not only that, but you'll feel like a complete bastard.

You can't save most of the guards slaughtered by the Joker and his goons in Batman: Arkham Asylum, but everyone you do save thanks you profusely, and the other surviving guards express their gratitude for you just being there. You even get an achievement on one level for saving all the guards and an escaped prisoner.

This is made somewhat worse, however, when you return to the same areas and find the bodies of those same guards.

Among the inmates of Batman: Arkham City are any number of innocent political prisoners. You'll hear them long before you see them, screaming and pleading for help as they're assaulted by criminals. And while you don't have to stop what you're doing and save them, it's very satisfying to dive in, kick their tormentors to the curb, and hear them thank you like only someone trapped in a war zone can.

The last chapter of Tales of Monkey Island ends in a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by the Big Bad on the happy-go-lucky main character, Guybrush Threepwood. It looks extremely painful and brutal but it's made even worse when you can hear the pain in Guybrush's voice every time he talks. Being a zombie at the time, he can't even die to escape the pain. The idea was that as he's getting thrown all over, you're suppose to come up with a way to get him out of it. In the commentary, the creators said a lot of people had trouble playing because they felt so terrible for Guybrush.

Grand Theft Auto IV actually gives you the chance to spare several targets that you've been assigned to kill. Some of them even show up with little sidequests you can follow if you proceed to do so.

Grand Theft Auto V has several moments of these: often you'll randomly encounter people in trouble, such as being held hostage, having their valuables stolen, or even trapped in a car wreck. You can ignore 'em, make things worse, or even go out of your way to help them out.

Red Dead Redemption has this in spades. There's several chances for you to help out the random bystanders, from saving a woman who's about to be stabbed to death, preventing innocent people from being shot down, or even helping a guy recover his stolen horse. Not only that, but you're even given the means of acting in self-defense through lethal or non-lethal means thanks to your lasso, which means if you work for it you can really build yourself up as a man of honor. It certainly feels rewarding when your fame goes up enough so that random citizens you pass by actually start saying "hi" or even praising you for your efforts. And that actually makes it all the more tragic when your character gets killed at the end and the Manipulative Bastard behind it gets you remembered as a monster.

Occasionally in Mad Max, you'll come across helpless survivors that are stranded in the dunes without wheels (which, given the world of Mad Max, means they're as good as dead). While you can't give them a ride to the nearest settlement, you can give them some of your precious water. While it's not completely selfless, as it's mainly done to get information, considering Max's usual attitude towards his fellow man, it's still pretty nice of him.

Space Marine has this through raw storytelling; there is neither in-game reward nor punishment for allowing the Imperial Guard units to be slaughtered by rampaging Orks or daemons, short of having that much less fire support as you carve a bloody swathe through that portion of the green tide. You do, however, start to feel for the plucky little guys, not just for the fact that they look upon you in awe like literal angels from heaven come to save them (with bits of NPC chatter making some seem like their lives are now complete and would be satisfied if they died fighting alongside you), but from the way the genetically enhanced, giganticOne-Man Army main characters praise them for holding out a last line of defense against seemingly insurmountable odds. You will end up rushing headlong into those xenos scum, just to make sure that many more brave Guardsmen don't get crumped while you hang back and shoot at things.

Yandere Simulator, being exactly what the name suggests, contains a lot of ways to creatively Murder the Hypotenuse, or just ruin their lives. However, there are two methods that don't require hurting the rivals- Befriending (in which you help a rival out with major life problems, and they're so grateful they give up on being a rival) and Matchmaking (in which you set them up with other students with crushes on them).

Tomb Raider: Underworld added tranquilizer guns to Lara Croft's arsenal, giving players the option to take out some enemies non-lethally. This is no doubt an attempt to salvage Lara's reputation as a coldblooded killer who guns down endangered tigers with no remorse.

A new gameplay feature that was added in Watch_Dogs 2 took the ATM hacking this way. The original purpose as used by Aiden was to siphon money from bank accounts without people knowing. Marcus, however, has the option to do the opposite, giving money to Non Player Characters he sees in the city. And just like the original, there's no repercussion or acknowledgement for doing so.

Adventure

Minecraft: Story Mode: You can protect Reuben from harm, support Olivia and Axel's endeavors, encourage Lukas, assist NPCs, etc.

Air Combat

Ace Combat games usually have a Redshirt Army alongside the player's plane. While it's possible to go ahead and focus on destroying the targets while leaving the other planes to go down, there's some satisfaction to be gained in helping allies to fend off enemy planes and gain air superiority. Fires of Liberation explicates this by rewarding the player for helping out in secondary operations, such as by letting them call down Macross Missile Massacres.

More importantly, your wingmen/-women. If you don't feel sad about PJ in Belkan War, you have emotional capacity of a tree stump, but on the other hand, can you really get yourself mad enough at Pixy, after all you've been through together, can you? And how about Edge, Grimm, and Chopper in AC5—don't you feel really close to them, despite not really knowing anything about them except their names and appearances?

In Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, you play a Naboo pilot leading a resistance movement against the Trade Federation occupying the planet. At various points, farmers are being slaughtered and their homes razed by droids. It's hard not to veer away from the main objective to quickly dispatch the metal bastards, especially as you listen to the terrified screams and desperate pleas over the comm channel.

Likewise, when you free prisoners from internment camps and lead them to safety. Only one or two of the vehicles have to make it, but it feels terrible knowing that they've suffered in those camps for weeks, only to die just when freedom was within sight. Unfortunately, it's damn near impossible to keep all of them alive.

The ancient PC game G-Police inspired a feeling of protectiveness over the nearly helpless ground units that filled the missions. The player character's fellow law enforcement officers that are on the ground need your air support, or they aren't going to last. The small, weak but relentlessly persistent vehicles engender a Papa Wolf feeling.

A sequence in the end turns it Up to Eleven when you become personally responsible for protecting a little sister who's been made into a normal girl. Usually the Little Sisters are invulnerable, but not anymore... meaning that she has no survival instinct. But she trusts her daddy to keep her safe....

Even moreso in the sequel. You'd be shocked how much more incentive you have to protect them when they call you 'daddy' and all the creepily cute dialogue they have is directed at you.

In BioShock 2, Mark Meltzer and by extension his missing daughter Cindy. Anyone who followed the ARG Something In The Sea is very familiar with Mark, and you can find audio diaries detailing his search for Cindy in the game. Many players became obsessed with the idea of helping Mark. Horribly, horriblysubverted when you later kill what seems to be a run of the mill Rumbler Big Daddy - only to approach his corpse and discover that it was Mark, who chose to be turned into one in order to protect Cindy. And God help you if you harvested the Little Sister who was with him...

It's not just the Little Sisters. There are players who actively try to find a way to collect and cure the girls without harming the Big Daddies...or failing that, get through the game without collecting any Little Sisters except the ones the storyline forces them to.

Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite was designed for this. The player character is tasked with finding and protecting her, and she's very powerful. She's also very cute, has Of Corsets Sexy, her head proportions and hair seem to make her look younger, and the early stages of game's development had a feature where overusing her powers actually harms her.

Apparently, melee attacks will upset Elizabeth, causing here to cringe or whimper. A lot of gamers have stopped doing it as a result out of concern for her.

This carries on into the Burial at Sea downloadable add-on game, particularly Episode Two where Elizabeth becomes a player character. The game encourages the player to avoid using deadly force (though the weapons are provided) as Elizabeth maintains her distaste for killing. The ending of Episode Two is particularly upsetting for players for whom this trope applies.

Another, minor instance in Infinite occurs right at the beginning, at the sick raffle doubling as the public stoning of an interracial couple. You have the option to try to bean the guy running it with the baseball: it doesn't work, but it does kick off a chain of events that help the couple escape. The couple appears later to thank you if you take this option. One of the developers noted in an interview that not a single tester decided to throw the ball at the couple on their first play-through.

It should be noted that although for most of Infinite and its Burial at Sea spin-off you are playing a male character, and a little bit of flirting occurs early on (especially at the start of Burial at Sea Episode 1 due to that version of Elizabeth being depicted as a Femme Fatale, the caring potential for Elizabeth soars Up to Eleven (and beyond) when the player learns towards the end of the storyline that Booker is Elizabeth's father.

There are achievements for saving certain soldiers in Call Of Duty 4 and World at War.

The first game strips Private Elder of his invulnerable status after Sergeant Moody gives you the explosives during the assault on Brecourt Manor, meaning he'll usually buy the farm about the time you reach the last gun. Screw that, says I.

In Call Of Duty 4, you get an achievement for saving an innocent farmer in one of the missions from being gunned down.

In the Vorkuta level in Black Ops, you'll face several times your prisoner allies being clubbed down by the guards. You've the potential to try to save them by stabbing the guards with your shiv to death. The sad part however is that no matter as fast as you try to be, the prisoners dies anyway.

A couple of the achievements in Black Ops II are awarded for preventing harm to various NPCs. Most notably, there is one for saving all the civilians being assaulted by out-of-control Panamanian soldiers in "Time and Fate"... while playing as the Big Bad, no less!

Far Cry 2. Keeping your buddies alive and doing what they ask gives instant return any time you are gunned down by the enemy mercenaries. Your health drops to zero, you fall to the ground, black out... and instead of being treated to a load game screen, you come to a 48-year-old Kosovar Papa Wolf shooting people left and right and dragging your bleeding hide to cover in one of the most movie-like moments ever pulled off in a 1st perspective game.

Not to mention they can sometimes die for real, while you continuously give them your healing items to ease their suffering.

The resistance soldiers that join you in Half-Life 2 ("Follow Freeman!") are infinite in number and they die easily. They're more or less supposed to be cannon fodder, making your life a little easier, but there is something inspiring about losing as few of them as possible. Especially the ones that look like Gordon Frohman.

Which also happens to look just like John Freeman, making them even more worth saving.

On a more specific note, you will become very attached to Alyx. She's arguably tougher than Gordon is thanks to her insane health regeneration (thankfully sparing you the normal pain of an Escort Mission) and can fight off zombies at close range, but you will go out of your way to protect her regardless. And when she's near-fatally wounded by a Hunter at the beginning of Episode 2 you will do anything to save her.

And who among us doesn't think there should be a "hug" button for after the Stalker car incident?

Metal Gear Solid V: Quiet is a buddy you can obtain a short way into the game. A very effective scout sniper, she is invaluable ingame. In addition, she has face and motion capture, as well as the likeness of, Stefanie Joosten, making Quiet extremely lifelike and easy to bond to. This is only increased by the fact that even though she never talks, as you raise your bond level with her she begins to act more and more fondly towards Snake, eventually becoming coquettish and then outright flirtatious with him, as well as her endearing hum in the background in missions as a constant reminder that she is watching out for you. However, near the end of the game we discover she is infected with the English strain of vocal cord parasites, and after she is forced to speak English in order to rescue Snake, she walks off into the desert to die to avoid infecting Snake and Mother Base. This caused such an uproar in the community that an extra mission was added where after 7 completions of the original mission where you meet Quiet, the player can complete the full story of the game and still be able to get her back and keep her as a buddy for good.

Jet Force Gemini: The ants. Although most of them are heartless monsters and shoot you or even the tribals without hesitation, there are some ants which are just throwing their weapons away when they see you and capitulate because they want to live further. Made it cruel when you have to kill them all to open an energy door...

In Mercenaries 2, most of the various factions are either idiots or complete jerks to you. The sole exception is the PLAV, who actually act like nice guys, and it becomes hard not to think of them in a positive light when they yell things like "Viva la Mercenario!" and "The Merc's on our side, we can't lose!" or even "The Mercenary is here! We're saved!" Everyone else is an asshole, but these guys like you and make you feel welcome and give you the impression that you're doing some good. No wonder everyone favors them over Universal Petroleum's jackass mercenaries.

The Chinese General somehow fits, too, as he gives you the final nuke without hesitating, thanking you for your assistance. Unlike the UN dude.

This is not surprising considering Peng is the leader of the Chinese faction in "Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction" but his helpfulness is even more endearing to the player assuming they were previously on good terms with him.

The single-player campaign of World in Conflict continually emphasizes that you're leading an undersized, overworked company of troops in desperate last stands and daring blitzkriegs. It feels like you must keep tabs on the health of all units and minimize losses, but in reality, you get as many reinforcements as you need, and a decent number of objectives let you Take Your Time.

The original trilogy especially has this, with such amiable and go-get-em Marines that you can't help but feel bad when they die. And then Legendary Difficulty happens...

The Huragok/Engineers. They, alone, pose no threat; instead they shield the nearby Covenant. However, in Halo 3: ODST, if you defeat the Covenant they're shielding, the Engineer/Huragok will...explode. It's...a bit of a lose/lose situation. It can end up either I Have to Leave One Covenant Alive Caring Potential (there's an achievement for not killing a single Huragok, explosions included) or Screw It They're Going to Die Anyways But I'm Still Sad Caring Potential.

In Halo: Reach, certain troopers will join you as fireteams, which now means the people who are essentially Red Shirt now have names, making it more tragic when they eventually die.

Deus Ex: Invisible War the entire Leila Nassif mission involves you finding a young girl, establishing that they're safe from the evil man who is killing the students who don't meet his extreme views, then telling her father that she's safe. There is no difference in the end result, but if you didn't stop at the police station first then expect to feel like crap.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - who would follow Malik the VTOL pilot's advice to leave her to attacking mercs after being shot down? Players have outright abandoned their pacifist runs without regret to save her, either because non-lethal takedowns weren't getting the job fast enough or because those bastards deserved it.

Similar rampages have also occurred upon players finding Malik's body in the Harvester hideout (assuming she wasn't saved) and/or witnessing the absolute massacre of terrified, innocent civilians in the Alice Garden Pods hotel.

HR gives you the option to talk several people out of suicide, and one man into releasing a hostage. You don't have to, but you get a nice bonus (Silver Tongue achievement) if you do.

When discussing Megan's death with her mother, you have the option to spare her the most gruesome details, telling her simply, "She didn't suffer," and to return a bracelet of Megan's that had been taken as evidence. Unlike above, neither of these actions grants any additional XP or tangible bonus - in fact, there is a hidden achievement for not returning Megan's bracelet.

One side quest in Hengsha involves tracking down a young woman whose social enhancement aug was paid for by the Triads and convincing her to either pay that month's debt installment/extortion fee or return the chip. After locating her, you have the option to pay the balance of her debt out of your own pocket.

The Missing Link DLC mission gives you the option of replacing a stasis pod's battery, saving the anonymous occupants life. You can also Take a Third Option when faced with a Sadistic Choice. Reaching a hidden back room where you can stop the poisonous gas and save both the scientist and the prisoners.

Special mention to those who do the latter on a "factory zero" run. Managing to reach the room in time with no augmentations, weapons or explosives. Going as far as to break the gas valve by throwing a fire extinguisher at it since they can't use a gun.

While Team Fortress 2 is, at heart, a game about blowing up as many members of the opposite team as possible, it still highly encourages you to protect your own team-mates. That's why you can air-blast or douse burning players in Mad Milk or Jarate at the expense of your own ammo/weapons. Similarly, many players will sacrifice themselves to protect their Medic or Engineer over themselves.

The characters have various automatic responses depending on what's going on around them. One of these is the 'thanks' response after being healed by a friendly Medic or traveling through a friendly Engineer teleporter. Many Medic and Engineer players attest that it's those little shows of appreciation that keep them playing even if the job itself is horrifically stressful.

One of the Pyro's weapons, the Manmelter, actually rewards you for utilizing caring potential. It has the ability to extinguish burning teammates, similarly to the airblast. But doing it with the Manmelter rewards the player with a free Critical Hit. This can prove very useful against the enemy team.

One of the best things you can do with the Heavy's Sandvich is... give it to your teammates so they can eat it (and heal!). One of the most common recipients of the Sandvich is the Medic. He can heal everyone except himself, so it's only fair that you return the favor by healing him with the Sandvich while he heals you with the Medigun.

Depending on what game you're playing and what mods you have installed, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games allow you to sell weaponry and equipment to NPC's. If you sold them good stuff like a primary weapon and some ammo to go along with it, they will equip it right then and there. In vanilla, you can also approach wounded stalkers that are neutral or friendly to you and hand them a medkit to heal them, which also makes the neutral a friend of yours. In a place as unfriendly as the Zone, few things are as satisfying as getting a badly-armed rookie back up and handing him an Abakan so he can survive a few days longer.

Horror

Dead by Daylight heavily encourages players to look out for each other. You are rewarded Bloodpoints for unhooking fellow survivors, healing their wounds, using a torch to rescue them by temporarily blinding the Killer. Keeping each other alive also has a practical purpose - the more survivors there are alive, the easier it is to avoid the Killer and escape. However, there's nothing stopping you from going back to rescue a downed survivor after the gate has opened and you can escape; you even get an achievement for doing so.

In an interesting variation of this, it's not unheard of for people playing as the Killer to help the last survivor escape by refusing to attack them and even carrying them to the exit. This allows the survivor to collect a lot of Bloodpoints for surviving, at the cost of the Killer losing Bloodpoints for not sacrificing them. As such, doing so is usually just an act of altruism from whoever is playing the Killer.

Fatal Frame II gives this to the player in the form of protagonist Mio's twinsister, Mayu. Mayu has a permanent limp from a childhood injury and can come across as quite a nuisance, the emotional aspect that she is supposed to fulfill works. She is Mio's twinsister and is obviously in need of Mio's help, not just because of her being physically incapacitated, but also because Mayu is too easily influenced by the spirits in Minakami Village. The plot of the game mostly revolves around Mio trying to find Mayu and get her back home. Though it's been revealed that Mayu is manipulative and purposefully fell and injured her knee, to cause Mio enough guilt to never leave her behind.

In Haunting Ground, you pair up with a white German Shepherd named Hewie early on. He becomes your main defense as you try to escape from your deranged pursuers. A major contributing factor towards what ending you get is how well you treat Hewie. You are given the option to praise him at any time, and can heal him if he is injured by giving him dog-only restorative items. If Hewie becomes so injured to point where he lies incapacitated on the ground, you can go over to him and press the 'praise' button to comfort him and get him back on his feet. There is also a part later on in the game where Hewie is shot after he runs off into a forest. The player must search for him, their only clue being his whimpers of pain. If the 'call' button is pressed, Fiona will say Hewie's name in a very sad and concerned voice.

Left 4 Dead can be this way sometimes when it comes to the survivor AI. Sure, they may get in the way sometimes when you are shooting and they may always snatch up health items first, but it's hard not to care about them when they are so willing to give up their health kits and pain pills to keep you alive, even if they are on the verge of death themselves. On the other hand, many players find the AI so intolerable ("What the hell!? You could have saved me from that Smoker, you were standing right next to it!") that they punish the computer players by withholding assistance and letting them suffer.

Averted in Resident Evil 4, with Ashley. You're supposed to care for her and watch her, but it occasionally falls into Video Game Cruelty Potential when after she causes you to restart one too many times, you spend time trying to shoot her with rocket launchers, mine darts, and sniper rifles.

Played straight with the dog caught in the Bear Trap at the beginning. You'd have to have ice in your veins not to free him with the whimpers he makes.

Resident Evil 2 has Sherry Birkin, a twelve-year-old girl whom player character Claire Redfield must protect. Sure, she's not as handy as Leon's partner character (badass Lady in Red Ada Wong), but she's just so adorable. What's more, when you walk through a level with Sherry in tow, and you stop long enough for her to catch up, she walks up and holds Claire's hand. It's hard not to feel at least a little protective of her.

Silent Hill 2 has a very insidious subversion of this trope. Being caring and protective of Maria is the wrong choice, and nets the player the worst ending, since Maria is a demonic creation of the town designed to test James' faithfulness to Mary.

Likewise subverted in Silent Hill 3. The game has a invisible Karma Meter that works in the background, with every monster killed netting ten points and every point of damage taken worth one point. Getting more than 4,000 points leads to the "evil" ending, in which Heather is possessed and kills Douglas. The single greatest thing you can do to get the "evil" ending is to... go into the confessional and forgive a woman who exacted vengeance on the girl who killed her daughter, later realizing what she had done. This single act nets a thousand points.

What really pushes this into a subversion is that the true meaning of Heather forgiving the woman isn't made clear until you play through a second time. By forgiving the woman for her crime, Heather isn't merely soothing her fear and guilt. She's accepting the responsibility of forgiving her or not, which Heather, as the reincarnation of Saint Alessa, has the divine right to do. Forgiving her means embracing who she really is, while saying nothing is a rejection of that and a decision to remain on the side of good.

Played straight in Silent Hill 4, which ends up with you playing lonely Henry protecting his next-door neighbor, Eileen. With Henry having been trapped in his hellish room for five or six days and counting, Eileen having been beaten within an inch of her life and limping around pitifully behind him, and the player being terrified (this IS Silent Hill), it's hard not to go out of your way to keep Eileen safe and healthy, either out of sympathy for one or both characters, or simply out of not wanting your lone companion to lose her mind and leave you braving the Otherworld all alone.

Silent Hill: Downpour puts a ton of focus on your ability to show empathy to others, humans and monsters alike. To get the best ending in the game you have to attempt to save and/or comfort every person you meet, even the cop who wants to kill you, and not kill a single monster. This determines whether Murphy was a good man to the bitter end who went to prison to avenge his son and was merely framed for killing Frank (best ending), or if he was a delusional psychopath who murdered his own son, murdered Frank, and didn't give a damn about either (worst ending).

A rather bizarre example with the old Infocom text-adventure The Lurking Horror. At one point you pick up a dead hand. At another you encounter a vat of liquid which reanimated dead tissue. Drop the hand in the vat and, it comes to life, clambers onto your shoulder, and just sits there. It will occasionally point you in the right direction if you're lost, and it can scare the crap out of an irritating NPC. Since it's one of the only friendly things in the game, many players get extremely angry if anything (re-)kills the dead hand.

Deadly Premonition - You play as an FBI agent visiting a small town afflicted by a series of murders. You first meet up with the sheriff and his deputies, who are very unhappy with your interference. Later on they get to know you, and you genuinely start to like them; they take you out to dinner, romance blooms with one, and you help them and the other different and likeable characters around town with their own individual problems. This is almost heartbreaking when you reach the end of the game.

The Walking Dead has this in spades in the form of the Morality Pet, Clementine, a 9-year-old girl that Lee finds in an abandoned house near the start of the series. Aside from that, you can opt to feed others without taking any food of your own in the second chapter, and take burdens on yourself to spare others a Sadistic Choice throughout.

A few chapters in Eternal Darkness will give you human NPCs that you can save from the monsters roaming the areas. Doing so will usually have them reward you with some information and a helpful item, or at the very least their gratitude.

The first chapter of Deep Sleep Trilogy says that a boy named Cody won't be able to wake up without his toy tiger. While exploring the area in the second game you'll find Cody's bed in an orphanage, along with the toy tiger in question. If you remember to put the tiger on the bed... nothing happens, it doesn't advance the plot in any way. But you do get a special scene in the ending of a newspaper clipping where a comatose child named Cody will wake up from a coma.

The Gregory Horror Show videogame has Neko Zombie, who teaches you the rules and dangers of the hotel. You can bring him food to help him with his constant starvation, sometimes receiving items in return (in particular, giving him his favourite food is one of the few ways you can get the rare Angel Herb).

MMORPG

World of Warcraft slightly invokes this trope in the Death Knight starting quest line when you have to execute a member of your own race that you knew way back after he/she pleads with you to come to your senses.

And again in the quest The Mosswalker Savior, which can very suddenly turn around the player's feelings about the Oracles.

While the Redpath questline is less intensive in Cataclysm, now the Eastern Plaguelands has an entire group of NPCs you travel with. Hearing things like the two paladins are childhood friends, or the Argent Crusader has been having trouble the last few years with his duties due to age, or even just that Gideon wants to kiss Fiona all make the player more attached to them. Which makes it so that Gideon's kidnapping results in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. At the end of the extremely long questline, Fiona gives the player a rare item, saying that it's something the entire caravan worked on for you and tells the you that you're welcome to join her caravan any time.

The game invokes this in a TRINKET with the badlands quest reward Rhea's Last Egg. Especially with the descriptive text "Please take care of him for me."

The craft skill Inscription has 'Forged Documents' as one of the higher level items. Once per day, you can make them and get a quest to turn them in to one of about six random people in the major city. One of them on the alliance side is Thomas Miller the baker, but if you give them to him you will probably feel like you just kicked a blind kid's one legged puppy. "My bread made someone sick? I hope my meager savings will help..."

There is a zone in the Hillsbrad Foothills where the player can find humans buried by a Mad Scientist in the ground with their heads sticking out, while surrounded by man-eating ghouls. The player, who at that point has done a good number of dog-kicking and killed plenty of humans, can choose to use a shovel to set them free - or to Mercy Kill them with a Shovel Strike.

A minor example for Alliance players in the Twilight Highlands is the "Small Comforts" sidequest. You're sent to retrieve various trinkets for dwarves who've lost their home. While it does mean you have to fetch them all over again, you can choose to give them to the dwarves in question instead of the quest giver. One of them insists that there will always be a spot for you at his dinner table after giving him back a hammer that had been in his family for generations. A very young dwarf asks if you've lost your home too and offers to let you sit next to her before you even give back her bear. The last is a widow who thanks you profusely for retrieving some dried flowers her husband gave her.

The quests in Westfall as of Cataclysm all revolve around clearing the zone of hostile beings, gathering supplies, and feeding the homeless. In other words, you're helping these people get back on their feet and stay there. It's very satisfying.

One of the Tillers dailies has you collect debts from various Non Player Characters around town. Every day two of them have trouble paying. While a couple of the NPCs just don't want two pay, one is saving up to leave town and the other needs the money to either repair her inn or feed her family. Players can choose to threaten them into paying or pay the debt themselves.

Invoked in Star Trek Online: A lazy or selfish player could send his away team ahead on ground missions to do all the dirty work for him, and if they die there's very little in the way of penalties. Similarly, Tactical Captains gain a power to summon Red Shirt security officers; as one might expect, they have very low health and their primary usage is as cannon fodder. It can be quite satisfying to keep them alive, though.

For the space segments, there are a few missions with NPC ships that are under attack when you warp in. In particular, the Deferi sector has a repeatable mission which involves stopping an attack on a convoy of weakly armed transport ships. There's absolutely no reward for saving them, aside from a little extra firepower throughout the rest of the mission, but it's hard to let them just get destroyed.

Also in Deferi sector, there's an optional encounter with a Breen starship. Your tactical officer will detect Deferi lifesigns aboard, so you're given the option to hail the ship. The Breen will let you talk to the (Obviously scared) Deferi captive, who pretends to be an exchange officer. At this point, there are several choices: You can buy the Deferi slave outright with Latinum, you can destroy the ship with the Deferi still aboard, or you can employ a sensor-disrupting tactic to beam the Deferi straight to your ship. In an especially unusual twist, you can then either destroy the Breen ship or take the Deferi and leave the Breen ship intact. This is one case where not only is it wise to show compassion for your allies, but for your enemy as well. Unfortunately for the Klingons, the only option to rescue the Deferi is to buy them with Gold Pressed Latinum. If you destroy the ship (which Klingons would suggest doing anyway) while the Deferi is on board, then you blame them for being weak enough to get captured in the first place.

Invoked in Vindictus. Ellis, who happens to be an annoyingly naive cadet who follows around an army official and happens to eventually grow on you. Eventually, in Ainle, where you are supposedly exploring a dungeon with him, you watch his face get smashed in by a boss. Against the camera.

Ever lose a cat in RuneScape? A kitten becomes a cat after ten real-time hours of being fed and petted. Alongside loving being stroked and enjoying play, a cat is the key to at least three quests. One of those quests involves mucking around inside a pyramidwithout being able to set the cat down. Since the rules concerning item loss-on-player death are linked to the price of items (your armor is more expensive than your cat) and you can only lose what you are actually holding, this can be frustrating.

Hell, it's easy to get attached to any of the pets. You'd be surprised how much you can like a giant crab.

When players die in RuneScape, all of the items they lost on death are kept under a short-lived gravestone. Given that the most dangerous areas and a long way from the nearest respawn, it's not unlikely that you'll lose a lot because you couldn't get back in time. However, other players can repair your gravestone, giving you precious minutes so you can get your armour back... or they can just watch the gravestone wither away and take what used to be yours...

BioWare follows their usual standard in Star Wars: The Old Republic. If you do a good turn for the various NPCs you meet during your quests, they'll frequently send you an in-game email with their heartfelt, and heartwarming, thanks. (And some are served with a side of Moment of Funny)

Likewise, each of the eight character classes has five Companion Characters. Being a dick to them usually makes you feel like an utter heel. Win their affection, though, and you can unlock new quests or even trigger a romance subplot.

Guild Wars second chapter, Factions, has a mission on the Luxon side, Gyala Hatchery. Normally, escort missions can be a pain, particularly if the AI you are guiding is prone to wading into combat (I'm looking at -you-, Rurik). Gyala Hatchery inspires players to go for the Master-level mission completion due to the fact that you must protect 3 newly hatched Seige Turtles, which waddle around in the middle of the group. Sure, they'll grow up to be artillery-carrying weapons of mass destruction, but it's hard not to feel bad when one bites the dust.

Guild Wars 2: half the quests boil down to search and rescue and disaster relief. Loot and experience are far less persnickety than one might expect, so you've nothing to lose by pulling a Big Damn Heroes on any random player about to keel over. That's right, they've encouraged caring about other players!

In DC Universe Online you'll occasionally find citizens on top of tall buildings contemplating suicide, who you can console for a small EXP gain.

Other

Touched upon in this Kotaku article about "The Daddening of Video Games"- the trend of making the player character a father (or father figure) to a younger character that must be protected.

Die Anstalt. These poor little fluffy animals are so screwed up, you can't help but feel for them and genuinely want them to get better. Especially the alligator. Dear God. The poor thing cries when you finally help him.

In Sabres of Infinity You may choose to be an honourable soldier and a fair, generous leader, abiding by the rules of engagement, with your men's best interests at heart.

Heavy Rain makes it very hard not to get attached to the characters. Especially considering all the horrible things they go through. Ethan is the most obvious example considering the death of Jason, and how determined the poor guy is to get Shaun back despite the trials. Just try not to care about him. And then there's struggling FBI profiler Norman, especially as you can help him get over his drug problem (not to mention it's painful watching him getting beaten up so many times). Even Shelby really wins you over with his heart-warming ways (we're talking about scrambled eggs and saving suicidal mothers, not drowning children here).

Ethan's interactions with Shaun and Jason can also make you rather protective of them.

Journey. By the end of the game, the strange other character you've been wandering around with will be your best friend ever. (Of course, you could also leave them behind...)

Some clever folks have figured out how to send messages to the other player by drawing lines in the sand at the end of the last level. The most common symbol drawn? A heart. Aww.

The Minoto version of "The Little Match Girl" is all about undoing the story's Tear Jerker ending by saving the eponymous girl. It begins with her lying frozen and apparently dead on the ground... but a nearby snowman will donate his arms to use in building a fire to save her. After you've built the fire, she wakes up and kisses the snowman out of gratitude, giving him Blush Stickers. From there you move on to giving her a decent meal, and then to buying so many matches that she can move into a castle.

Numerous players in Minecraft have adopted pet slimes, since a bug prevents them from despawning. The addition of wolves and cats also encourages this, since they can be tamed and will subsequently fight alongside you or shun creepers respectively as long as you can keep them healthy.

The Let's Play'er Snap Wave adopted a pet creeper he named Mr. Creepy, which saved his life on numerous occasions. He almost started crying after it died.

Giving Villagers happy, safe, monster-free dwellings is also rewarding, since a grown village will eventually spawn friendly, powerful iron golems that will attack hostile monsters.

Being nice to noobs (more often just new to the server than just multiplayer) is not the norm as they are usually characterized as all being thieves and griefers. Many players will even try to scam them out of what little they have or raid their dirt and cobblestone houses. However if you let them stay at your large manor house or secret underground base they will usually be more than grateful, (so long as you made sure they weren't a thief) and it can be rewarding to have another person help out. And come on, everyone is a noob once.

Tamed wolves. Part of the appeal is having them serve as attack wolves to do your hunting and fighting for you. The other half is getting together a small entourage of those cute puppy-eyed critters and either keeping them home safe or taking them on adventures with you. The same can be done with the Creeper-repelling cats.

Catherine gives you plenty of opportunities to encourage, teach and save from themselves other guys in the same situation you are in. In fact, they'll even thank you for it. In fact, discouraging them from continuing the climb will result in their deaths. Some dialogue options actually make it very hard to tell which is which, so Save Scum early and often.

The Christmas 2007 event on Gaia Online had users fostering adorable shabby orphans, who would hang out by the user's avatar. The goal was to respond to the orphan's occasional requests and improve their (Dickens-esque) living conditions a little before returning them to the orphanage (and receiving an item as a reward for every few orphans so helped). Many users decided to "unofficially adopt" their orphans by never returning them to the orphanage. Then, when the event ended and the orphans went away anyway, the users stormed the forums to demand them back.

This led to the February 2008 Chance Item... adoption forms for said orphans.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier's second mission involves the Ghosts hunting down a warlord who has taken over a refugee camp. You get Challenges to avoid civilian casualties and kill every last one of the warlord's mooks terrorising the people.

Scribblenauts. You can sit in a level writing item after item to make NPCs happy and safe. Helping characters out is the entire point of Scribblenauts Unlimited.

Sparadrap from Noob cares about his pets enough to go berserk when they get killed in front of him and goes an extra mile by trying be friendly to enemies whose sole purpose is to be killed by players. This is also the reason for which the name of the Player Killer guild should really be Player, Mount and Pet Killer guild.

The early FMV computer game Critical Path was marketed as featuring a new level of interactivity that would make the player truly care for the game's lead character, Kat. The reality is the game simply was an interactive movie with limited actual interaction by the player (basically of the "save her" or "let her die" choice variety), and any "caring" was limited to players who might have developed a crush on the actress playing Kat, given that the scenes occasionally called for her to express fear, etc. on occasion.

In Tangerine Tycoon, refusing to put the cat into your tangerine machine will force you to skip one tier of upgrades, but in the next playthroughs you will get thanked by the cats and its friends with some extra tangerines to help you get started.

It's not a video game, but being nice saved the players' bacon in Ruby Quest. Had they not tranquilized Stitches and left him a portrait of the Metal Glen's patients happy together (from before everything went to hell in a handbasket), then He wouldn't have pulled an Androcles' Lion and saved them from Ace. They also managed to make the ending just that much sweeter by saving another patient, Jay, who was trapped in the water filtration system by hooks. It's notable that they weren't supposed to do this, as they were only able to take Stitches down non-lethally because they bashed open a cabinet with tranquilizer inside instead of getting the key, and Weaver had never even considered that they would try to save Jay, and allowed it because he couldn't see any reason why they couldn't do it.

The story of Noh is a legendary Dungeons & Dragons example. It goes like this: A group of players were doing a Dungeon Crawl when they came upon an ornate and obviously magical sword and chainmail shirt. The items were guarded by a young girl (really a construct) who could only say 'no' and (if saying no would be misleading) 'please do not take these items'. The party bard tried to use music to 'awaken her dormant soul', and rolled high enough that the DM let her shed a single tear. The players promptly suffered Cuteness Proximity and decided to take the girl instead of the items. They took her with them, risked their lives for her, and named her 'Noh' since it was what she said when asked her name.

One person you encounter, when you offer to trade, says "I only have this gold staff to offer" and of course - since their boat is out of food, the right thing to do is to give him anything edible.

Another woman will say "I don't have anything to offer" when you offer to trade with her - naturally if you give her a map, she will say "Thank you!" because it helps her find what she's looking for.

Said gold staff becomes a Chekhov's Gun when you find out it's an Incan artefact and trade it to an Incan person, who is glad that you have given an artefact back to his people.

Platformer

In the rematch against Toad Man in Rock Man 4 Minus Infinity, you can turn him into a toad then spare him by not squishing him. He (as a toad) appears in the credits if you do this, and you get points added to your score.

The Oddworld games really inspire this, not only because rescuing the lanky, bug-eyed Mudokons and little furry Fuzzles is the goal of the game and not doing so has... unfavourable consequences for the heroes. Even though some people prefer to kill of as many as possible, most players get really attached to their buddies and constantly quicksave and quickload when they die.

In The Adventures of Lomax, you can make it your holy mission to defeat every single enemy you come across, since it turns them back into normal lemmings.

Thomas Was Alone: Despite the game's protagonists being simple 2D mute rectangles, the narration makes you care for their welfare more than many more defined video game characters.

RPG

BioWare RPGs all feature engaging casts of secondary characters that look up to the protagonist. While you can do mean, terrible things to them if you want, it's usually more satisfying to be nice to them. Most of the games also feature certain scenarios with diplomatic solutions. Sure, it's easy to wipe out a tribe of kobolds or lizardmen, but it's much more satisfying to earn their trust, arrange for peaceful cohabitation with humans, and have them consider you an honored friend.

Aerie's romance arc, as long you can endure her initial whining. This girl have gone through hell. Being captured by slavers, sold as a circus freak because of her wings. Having said wings becoming diseased and amputated medieval style to save her life have turned her into a almost literal Broken Bird. However, if you romance her and follow the arc through, her ending is one of the happiest in the game. Travelling to her former home, finding her parents who never gave up their search for her and getting married with Gorion's Ward there.

Neverwinter Nights gives you Deekin. Anyone who can be cruel to Deekin is a monster with no soul. And those few who didn't care for him probably found themselves attached to Grobnar from Neverwinter Nights 2.

Aribeth's reaction if you convince her to come back at the end of Neverwinter Nights. And her reaction if you reassure her in the face of her apprehension at returning to the world of the living at the end of Hordes of the Underdark.

Seeing Carth recover from his paranoia and vow to help you despite The Reveal.

Finding out that you were Juhani's inspiration for becoming a Jedi. She can be touchy and temperamental, but crack that and you have an awesome friend.

And while you can cross the Moral Event Horizon by killing Mission and Zaalbar the fact that you have to do it playing Dark Side has stopped many players from actually following through.

Jade Empire: the Drowned Orphan Quest. The ghosts of the orphans desperately want peace, as does the orphanage keeper, who was unable to save them. The Open Palm ending allows you to be bring peace to the spirits of all parties. Hell, half the fun of Open Palm is being able to settle the restless dead.

It's hard to be cruel to cute little Wild Flower...and so satisfying to kick that nasty demon that's bothering her into next week.

Kicking Sun Li's ass is very satisfying after hearing him insult Dawn Star (the sweetest, nicest person in your party) to her face. It's also a CMOH to free the enslaved spirit of Sun Kin, who had been forced into being Death's Hand for his corrupted brothers' benefit.

Picking the Colonist backstory in Mass Effect results in a sidequest where you find a character who was from the same colony as you, but who was captured and enslaved and became severely messed up. She was rescued, but grabbed a weapon away and hid. She talks about herself in the third person, and you can either rush in and jab her with a sedative or talk to her, approaching slowly, and administer it without spooking her. On the way you can learn some of the details about what happened and tell her it's not her fault. If you play it right, you can convince her to take the sedative herself, then, as she falls asleep in your arms, whisper the following to her:

Shepard: You'll dream of a warm place. And when you wake up, you'll be in it.

That scene in particular is a Shout-Out to Aliens. It's much more noticeable if you're playing a Female!Shepard.

In the sequel, you get an email from her with her using the first person, thanking you and saying she's getting better. Yep, Good Feels Good.

Mass Effect 2 is replete with these. In particular, Miranda, Thane, Kasumi and Tali's loyalty all have endings that are bound to warm even the hardest hearts. And, of course, the (completely necessary) Paragon Interrupt to hug Tali.

You can encounter a quarian on her Pilgrimage, being harassed by security on a false claim of thievery. Shepard can mention he has knowledge of the quarians, and she's genuinely shocked that an alien would bother to know anything about her race. The tone suggests that s/he's the first person to speak to her like a normal person since she left to Flotilla. And you can tell the people harrassing her to piss off with an Interrupt.

Early on in the game you're hunting down Archangel and find out about a concerted effort by nearly every local crime syndicate to take down a vigilante. They're sending in wave after wave of dumb mercenaries as cannon fodder—death is a guarantee. Just after Shepard signs up to infiltrate the groups, a dumb hotshot kid comes in to join. It's obvious that this kid won't last two seconds, and a Paragon interrupt has Shepard take his gun from him and send him off. Later, you get an email from him thanking you for saving his life.

After Jacob's loyalty mission, it's nice to hear from one of the women his dad abused, saying she's getting better.

After Grunt's loyalty mission, it's not something that comes immediately, but you essentially gave Grunt a reason to live. You gave him a family in Clan Urdnot, a proper father figure if Wrex survived Virmire, and, if you killed the thresher maw, you gave him the respect of God knows how many krogan. For a tank-bred, that's not bad.

After the suicide mission, if you romanced a crew member and they lived, you can invite them up to your cabin to cuddle.

If you romanced Tali in 2 and make sure she survives the suicide mission, when you meet up again in 3, she says that she left a present for in your cabin. What do you find? A picture of her without her suit on.

Dragon Age: Origins has this both in companion-related quests and in dialogue at camp. Though in one case there's an odd subversion: Alistair's companion quest. He wants to go to Denerim to meet his long-lost half-sister. No matter what dialogue options you choose, there is no way for this encounter to end well, and Alistair is badly upset by it... but if you choose the "some people are selfish" dialogue option afterwards, this turns out to be a crucial turning point that can result in Alistair being "hardened"... which opens up some positive outcomes later on. In fact, if you're playing as a female character romancing him, it's the only way outside of playing a human noble and becoming queen yourself that your relationship will survive if you end up making him king.

Leliana and Alistair are this in general, especially if you romance one of them. They're both just too damn sweet and Adorkable.

The team's resident Dark Action Girl, Morrigan, comes across as a Stupid EvilJerk Ass to most of the cast. This can also extend to the player. But if the PC shows her respect and treats her well, it is possible to befriend or romance her. Considering what a dick she can be at times, it can be very satisfying to see Morrigan slowly soften up when she's around you and basically tell you that you are the only person she gives a damn about.

Your dog. From the way he fetches items for you, fights alongside you, interacts with your teammates, and rolls around happily on his back when you pet him at camp, even the most ruthless Warden will probably be nice to their poochie.

Dragon Age II has Merrill, a shy elf girl who turned to blood magic and is now hated by her whole clan. Once she befriends Hawke, she's the most adorable little thing. Heck, even your snarky companions act nice to her!

Through conversations that your party members have walking around, it's revealed that Varric is paying money to thugs to leave Merrill alone while she walks around at night.

Though Dragon Age II also makes this trope hurt like hell, what with all the horrible things that your characters go through (or do...)

Dragon Age: Inquisition has a situation that can end with Hawke sacrificing his/her life to save the Inquisitor and a Grey Warden, something that almost completely breaks Varric. He later tries to tell the Inquisitor an amusing story about Hawke, but looks about ready to break into tears for the entire story. The Inquisitor has the option to hug him at one point, something that he clearly appreciates.

Non-Bioware but definitely closely related example: talking to the Handmaiden after Atris nearly tortures her to death with Force Lightning for falling in love with you in Knights of the Old Republic 2.

Possibly more so is the speech Visas/Mical (depending on player character gender) gives you after the final trip to Dantooine if you were nice to her/him.

Dark Souls has Quelaag's Sister aka. "The Fair Lady", the leader of the Chaos Servant covenant who is a beautiful naked woman from the waist up and a hideous demon spider below that (just like her sister, who you had to kill to reach her as one of the game's more iconic bosses). Unlike Quelaag, though, the Fair Lady is deathly ill due to selflessly sucking the blight pus from the infected people of Blighttown, taking their illness onto herself and leaving herself near death. She was bonded to the fire to save her life (itself a Fate Worse Than Death) but she was still left blinded, completely bleached white, her spider legs twitching feebly and talking in an agonised whisper (if you have the right item that allows you to understand her at all). She mistakes you for her beloved sister due to her blindness, and you can level up in the covenant by giving her Humanity to help ease her suffering (and possibly your own guilt for killing Quelaag, robbing her of the one she loved the most). You get all the practical rewards from the covenant (the powerful Chaos Storm pyromancy and access to a useful shortcut) once you've donated 30 Humanity to reach the 2nd tier; the 3rd tier (at 80 Humanity) does nothing except visibly relieve the Fair Lady's pain (her legs stop spasming and she talks in a less-pained voice). Expecting players to go that far for a merely cosmetic reward would be enough, but some people have actually gone beyond it to hit the Cap on how much Humanity you can gift her, even without any kind of reward. The cap? 60,000 Humanity. Talk about a character people can empathise with!

Many of Nippon Ichi's game have ending flags based on the number of allies you killed. In particular, the first Disgaea game, Hour of Darkness, locks you out of the best (and ultimately canon) ending if you kill even one of your own characters.

It's also easy to become loyal to causes within the game. Try not to feel proud when you wear a Kvatch cuirass after saving the town.

Pillaging your way through Oblivion - especially just after completing the Crusader quest- can bring with it a healthy sense of retribution as you loose a hundredfold the pain and suffering of Kvatch on those poor, poor Dremora. Good for Level Grinding, too.

Or sad when your little Imperial Legion helpers run to help (and die)...

Baurus, the only other character to survive the attack in the tutorial, will pledge loyalty to the player and accompany him on several quests - assuming he survived the last one. Emerging from the Oblivion Gate onto the Bruma battlefield where Martin is giving a victory speech only to see Baurus among the dead can be quite a Player Punch.

One of the quests for the Dark Brotherhood involves you killing an entire family, and the mother herself gives you her children's names and locations when she thinks you're from a professional gift-buying service. It's hard to not feel like a terrible person for what you're about to do.

One quest in the Fighters Guild has a woman named Biene Amelion hire you to raid her family's crypt and fetch some artifacts that she hopes she can sell off and clear some debts accumulated by her father. You can choose to forgo that entirely and just pay the debt off yourself.

In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim during the quest 'The Heart of Dibella' you can take the girl to say goodbye to her family before she moves to Temple of Dibella in Markarth. There is no quest requirement for this.

The Hearthfire DLC allows you to adopt and raise orphaned children. They will live in one of your houses and you can give them gifts and play games with them.

The game allows the player to actually marry a companion. Although domesticity is at a minimum, the option does exist for one to keep a spouse out of harm's way, and a spouse can also be killed in action.

Fable II allows you to marry and have a son or daughter, which will rapidly mature into an adorable child that calls you "dah-dee" or "mum-mee" depending on your gender. Big Bad Lucius kills them at the end of the game. Which hurts less than when he kills your dog.

You can get them back though, but you'll lose all that money and sacrifice everybody else who has died. Guess it depends on what you care most for...it's got to be the dog surely!

A great many players developed an attachment to recurring NPC Dogmeat, going to great lengths to keep him alive despite being more of a liability than anything else. (Hell, the AI practically made him play fetch with sticks of thrown dynamite in the first game). Bethesda seemingly took note of this trend, as the Fallout 3 DLC Broken Steel introduced a Perk called 'Puppies!' that specifically lets Dogmeat respawn if killed. He even comes backtougher.

Fallout 3 in general can involve a lot of this for a good character. Things like saving Big Town give you a real warm and fuzzy feeling, especially if you don't ask for a reward. Although it makes money a little harder to come by, the role-playing satisfaction inherent in being good to Big Town and Megaton and Rivet City and anywhere else decent people are just trying to get by is one of the best parts of the game for a good character.

In Fallout 3, reports of your exploits are also spread by the disc jockey Three Dog, who pays increasing tribute to you. You also get random encounters from inhabitants of the wasteland thanking you for everything you're going for them. It can increase the warm-and-fuzziness.

Though sometimes at the cost of sheer rage induction. Try making regular roundtrips to Megaton to maintain your stash when your Karma hits Very Good status (which is actually a lot harder to avoid than you think). The limitations and mechanics of the dialogues will turn your rewards into an unbearable punishment.

In Fallout: New Vegas there is ED-E the eyebot, who is also a loyal Companion Cube to a degree, as it doesn't talk unless prompted to (at first) and then only in a series of unintelligible beeps. In the base game it's a pretty useful companion that the player is encouraged to bond with, but then it got a DLC focused around its counterpart. In Lonesome Road, a different ED-E is your only companion in The Divide, which is a post Apocalyptic Hell-scape. This ED-E's beeps are more diverse and it reveals more of its backstory through Audio-Logs, and your dialogue options with it become much more conversational and diverse. You can either choose to respond to it with love and acceptance or blatantly tell it that it is a machine and that you don't care about its problems.

In the first story quest, you can either protect Goodsprings from the Powder Gangers or help them wipe it off the map. Even evil players tend to lean towards the former.

In Fortification Hill, you meet a little slave girl named Melody, whose teddy bear was stolen by one of the legionnaires. To get the bear back, you can swipe it from him or you can fight a few of his hounds while armorless and armed with only a machete. The fact that she's a little slave girl you can't rescue without mods makes this the only act of kindness the player could afford her, short of massacring the entire legion.

In Fallout 2, if you have Restoration Project mod installed, you can do various little favors to your companions. This includes rescuing Sulik's sister from the slaver camp, curing Cassidy's heart condition, buying a set of armor for Marcus and K-9/Dogmeat, and preventing peaceful talking deathclaws being massacred by the Enclave.

In Fallout 4, you can help build a number of safe, comfortable settlements for destitute wastelanders to take refuge in, including the lonely old Vault-Tec salesman you meet at the start of the game. You can rebuild the Minutemen and help them keep these settlements protected. You can retrieve a young girl's last message to her toymaker father. You can even help free a lost ghoulified kid who got stuck in a fridge for 200 years, reunite him with his parents, and protect them from slavers.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years puts Calca and Brina (raised out of the Uncanny Valley territory they resided in Final Fantasy IV) in the player's team and has them rescue Rydia and Luca from an attack. After this, they malfunction and Luca is forced to deactivate them. Later, under normal circumstances, Luca is forced to scrap them for parts in order to get her airship off the ground. This can be skipped, actually. The way to skip it is a complete Guide Dang It! that involves random drops in a game where the drop rate is simply inexcusably low, but let's be honest, who wouldn't do it?

That sort of thing happens with Miluda, which is an enemy example. You have to fight her twice and there's no way around it.

It's quite the Wham moment the first time you go to the effort of having a Mediator with Invite in the party specifically for that fight, go out of your way to incapacitate all of her allies, and then learn that no, there's no way you can convince her to join your side.

Some players will go out of their way to save their generic party members from death (if any character stays at "knocked out" status for too long, they die permanently), even if it means restarting a battle that is almost over.

Similarly in Tactics, if you ever try and manually dismiss a party member from the menu screen, they give a "Do you really want to do this" speech. With generic team mates it hurts the soul a bit, and with unique characters it hurts a bit more, but at least they're just sad about leaving. Monsters, however - all but one of which the player will have personally recruited via Mediators - are heartbreaking because not only are they sad at having to leave, they don't understand what's going on.

There is a segment when you have to take care of another character by feeding him fish. Whether he lives or dies doesn't matter to the story as the game progresses either way, but there's something oddly rewarding in keeping him alive.

On the other hand, the emotional impact of the story is much greater if he dies, so some players try to make him die on purpose. Of course, since the mechanics of the fishing minigame are never explained, there's high chance the result during your first playthrough will be random anyway.

Perhaps especially notable, as the person you save is in fact the guy who created and maintained the machines that suck the life energy out of magical creatures, and who was utterly furious at you when you turned said machines off.

He's also the closest thing the character you're controlling has to a father figure. Just for the record.

When you are trying to escape from you first visit to theFloating Continent, there is a timer showing how long you have to escape before a Non Standard Game Over. Shadow doesn't show up at the end at your airship with the rest of the party, and if the player leaves immediately, he's Killed Off for Real, but they can save him if the wait for the timer to almost run out, giving him time to catch up, allowing him to be recruited back into the party later. As Shadow proved to memorable character even among this game's cast, many players that know that opt to save him. Likewise, while getting most of the character back in the World of Ruin is optional, they're likable enough that you're likely to want to help them.

Final Fantasy VII has this trope twice. The most famous one, near the end of the game, is when you confront the Turks one last time. If you did a sidequest earlier in which you teamed up with them, you can choose not to fight. The two sides make peace and go their separate ways. An earlier example is when you steal a submarine and encounter a trio of Shinra goons guarding it... except it's those same goons you befriended earlier in the game when you were undercover. You can choose to simply take the guards prisoner instead of killing them.

Also, in an inversion, Rude has a crush on Tifa, as he tells Reno at one point. If she's the only party member left standing, he has a 50% chance of hesitating and skipping his turn! So the game cares about you, too!

Another moment comes when your party is on the way to Corel. You can investigate a Cokatolis nest and find some adorable baby chicks...which happen to be surrounded by Phoenix Downs. You can choose to leave them be or grab the treasure.If you pick the second option, their angry mother comes to call.

Final Fantasy IX: During the invasion of Cleyra, you can hurt the Alexandrian soldiers enough to make them flee, rather than killing them. After all, they didn't start the war either....

Lost in Blue, which has DS and Wii incarnations, is another game built around this. You play as Keith, a young man who finds himself stranded on a desert island with Skye, who has lost her glasses and is Blind Without 'Em. You must forage for food and water to keep you and your partner alive, and since she doesn't leave the cave you call home unless you're dragging her by the hand a la ICO, you have to plan ahead to leave her adequate food and water while you're away unlocking new parts of the island or hurry back when her stats drop too low. "She's getting thirsty... She's hungry..."

Although RPGs can be a mixed bag when it comes to this trope, since most tend to revolve around a group of plucky young adventurers who can go on for days about The Power of Friendship, the later games in the Persona series are rife with it in the form of Social Links. Because it's unlikely that a player will be able to successfully complete all of them in a single playthrough, and there's no consequence for not doing them, the ones the player does complete are probably going to be the ones for the characters they like best (like the little girl whose parents are divorced in 3, or the boy whose sister was murdered in the main plot in 4).

Persona 2: Innocent Sin places the characters and their relationships at the absolute heart of the story, fleshing them and their motivations out so deeply that the decision of which Love Interest you prefer can feel simultaneously like powerful Caring Potential for the one you choose, while equally great Video Game Cruelty Potential for the one(s) you pass over.

In the remakes of Pokémon Gold and Silver, HeartGold and SoulSilver, you can have not only Pikachu out and about with you, but any Pokémon you want. So if Pikachu couldn't earn your love, now you've got options.

Not only that, but can get to interact with them in a much deeper level. At first they will get angry at you repeatedly, but if you care well about them they will go as far as play with you and look for flowers and things to give to you.

Ever since the happiness system was introduced in Gen II, you try to keep your Pokémon happy, even if only for those that evolve because of it. Interestingly, there's a move that increases in power for this (Return), and one for how much they hate you (Frustration).

Forging a deeper connection with your Pokémon is pretty much the whole point of a NuzlockeChallenge run. If a Pokémon faints, it is "dead" and can never be used again, the number of Pokémon you can catch is also limited, which makes you use species that would've been overlooked otherwise, and you also have to name every one you catch. When done right, every lost party member feels like a punch in the gut.

Petty, an author of a Nuzlocke comic, just knows how to pull at your heartstrings every time she has a friend die.

Something completely unrelated to the Pokémon themselves, however, is an optional sidequest in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl and its remake, Platinum. In it, there is a cave beneath Cycling Road named Wayward Cave, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. In the furthest point of the cave is a young girl named Mira, whose sprite looks to be about half the height of your character's. She has a lone Kadabra without Teleport, Dig, Rock Smash (required to get through the cave), or Flash. She begs you to escort her out, which your character does without your input (you'd have to have a heart of ice to refuse, though). What really makes this an example is that Mira really doesn't give you much of a reward for saving her, other than you being able to rebattle her in the Battleground or team up with her in the Battle Tower later, neither of which are very significant in themselves. Saving her is completely optional, too. Fridge Horror kicks in when you think about the real-life implications of being stuck in a dark cave with literally no way of escape, and exactly how terrifying it would be to a little girl.

Pokémon-Amie in Pokémon X and Y was made with this in mind, allowing you to interact with your Pokémon by petting them, feeding them cake, playing games with them, and making faces at them (which they'll try to imitate), among other things. A Pokémon that's become fond of you through this will also gain numerous benefits in battle, along with the battle text being changed to emphasize the bond they share with you. This feature was retained for Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire and Pokémon Sun and Moon, with minor changes, in the form of the PlayNav and Pokémon Refresh.

One of the benefits to a Pokémon with high affection is that sometimes it will tank a hit that would otherwise knock it out, only to say that it "hung on out of love for its Trainer." Likewise, a particularly affectionate Pokémon may muster up all their willpower to break through Standard Status Effects "to keep you from worrying," as well as dodge enemy attacks regardless of their accuracy.

There's a small example in the Hoenn remakes; on an early route, you'll encounter an NPC who complains that his Pokémon is really tired and he should have brought a potion. The NPC was also in the originals, but this time around, if you have a potion, the game will allow you to give it to him. You don't get a reward for doing this, other than the NPC thanking you, but it is a nice little touch.

The Quest for Glory adventure/RPG series has the character classes of fighter, mage, thief and paladin. Becoming and playing as the latter requires going well out of the way of the rest of the game mechanics to do Right. Some of a paladin's deeds are too rewarding to count as simple altruism (returning a reward, telling a disarmed enemy to re-arm -> Flaming Sword), others likely count (snuggling a rotting undead -> one released spirit, you smelling and waist deep in a lake).

In Snatcher, you can reconcile with your wife, or help an elderly Freeman return to his family before death. You are not rewarded for doing so beyond the congratulations of your Robot Buddy.

In Undertale, not only can you spare every monster in the game, up to and including the bosses, you can take it one step further and hang out with several of the boss monsters after fighting them. In fact, you have to avoid killing anything and make friends with several characters in order to get the Golden Ending. The game also gives you several chances to back out of a No Mercy run, and not doing so will have the game remind you just how terrible of a person you are.

You can talk to a snowman who wants to see the world and agree to carry a piece of him with you on your travels. The snowman piece is a very good healing item which can make it tempting to just eat it but if you instead keep it all the way through the final boss fight, the epilogue will have either Sans comment that "you made a snowman really happy" or the snowman himself thank you if you backtrack to talk to him again.

The Golden Ending credits tells you what happened to each of the monsters you encountered after the game. The bosses all get short cutscenes, but the random enemies just get short blurbs, which can either be white or yellow. Yellow blurbs have different text and indicate that the monster's life has been more fulfilling because of some action you took when you encountered them. Getting every single yellow blurb is something of a Guide Dang It!, but it's incredibly rewarding to know that the monsters are all leading happy, fulfilling lives because of your actions.

The whole backtrack after a Golden Ending is itself this. If you go back to the very first Froggit you met, who asked you to spare a little mercy towards monsters you may encounter, it will say, "I don't know if it's because of what I said, but it appears you have grown to be a kind and conscientious person.", basically thanking you for following his advice and saying how proud he is of you.

No matter how you play the game, one of the characters will always pass judgment on you right before the final boss. If you didn't kill anyone, he'll say that you didn't gain LV, but you did gain love, and that though you didn't kill anyone, that doesn't make you naive or a coward, it only means you kept a tenderness in your heart and that even when you ran away from a fight, you did it with a smile.

In Valkyria Chronicles, you command a small squadron of Militia soldiers in a WWII-ish war. Each and every one of those 50-odd soldiers have their own appearance, traits, skills, backstory, and future life that they will go on to after the ending - IF they're still alive. And thanks to the fairly well-balanced AI, the only way they're going to die, is if YOU screw up. And yes, they have death-sequences with lines, calling out to loved ones, declaring their loyalty to the nation, the unit, or even just to you, as they draw their last breath... which, of course, makes you hate General Damon with the burning intensity of a thousand suns when he starts treating the militiamen as expendable Cannon Fodder.

Zhao, a Chinese ex-gangster, gave you information to fulfill a debt of honor, and now his gang is trying to kill him for helping you; he's so stoic about his fate that it just seems wrong if you can't kill the enemy fast enough to keep him alive, even though you get the information either way.

A Japanese girl came to America hunting a demon that slaughtered her master, and you've helped her find that demon; even if she dies in the fight, you can still kill the demon and get the mission XP, but who really wants to see Yukie die after coming so far for vengeance?

A confused elderly scholar got kidnapped for his knowledge of an ancient sarcophagus, and you needed to rescue him for that same info. When you find him, he's polite, helpful, scared, clad only in a bathrobe, locked inside a damp corner of a cave, and willing to tell you everything he knows for even a hope of rescue. Once his captors set off the bombs and bring down the entire cave in a last-ditch effort to kill you, you can either sprint off on your own and make much better time, or take the time to lead out Dr. Johansen while trying to ignore that big flashing death timer on your screen.

Therese and Jeanette Voerman, two feuding sisters actually two sides of a Malkavian's split personality. If you've come to like both, it can be a Player Punch when you're forced to choose which one of them dies at the hands of the other. If you have high enough social stats and you've been nice to both of them, though, you can talk them into forgiving each other and reuniting.

And then there's a dying girl you can save by turning her into a ghoul. The process creates a "blood bond" meaning she falls in love with you (though this is closer to an addiction to your presense and blood), and she will ask to stay with you, offering you her college money and other assistance, including ultimately the best armour in the game. However if you keep her around she will tell she is being followed and will eventually be killed by your enemies in a cutscene. Heartbreaking as it is, it really is better for her to turn her away.

In The Witcher, your character is, at one time, entrusted to take care of a young Child Mage who seems to be a minor NPC early on in the game. You're tasked with teaching him lessons about life, morality, and just general stuff which sort of endear him to you over time, especially given the number of times you need to protect him. Which makes his sudden and irreversible disappearance roughly three fourths of the way into the game all the more painful, not to mention the possible Twist Ending that hints at what happened to him afterward.

One of the first quests in Ancient Domains of Mystery provides this (along with That One Sidequest): Why would you risk your brand-new level one character going up against giant ants (fast carapace-armored psych-immune killing machines), an underground river (in a world with Super Drowning Skills) and four more levels of early-game hell? Because an adorable little girl admiringly calls you a "true hero" for bringing back her puppy dog. That's why.

There's much caring potential in Fallout: New Vegas. First, there's the companions, each of them is well written, well voiced, incredibly helpful, and, thankfully, in casual mode, quite immortal. However, in Hardcore mode, they can (and almost certainly will) die. For this reason, more than a few people avoid taking companions with them in Hardcore mode, seeing as how they couldn't bear the thought of seeing their friends die.

Then there's the towns, filled with nice, charming, helpful citizens who will give you discounts and free stuff once you've done them a few small favors. Makes it a hell of a lot harder for you to come back in your next playthrough and murder them all horribly with a chainsaw,doesn't it?

In Golden Sun 1, the town of Kolima has all of its residents turned into trees - frozen in whatever position they were in at the time. If you visit the town before this happens, you'll see a group of kids playing by a river just outside of the town. They stand on each others' shoulders to try to get a persimmon out of the tree. When you come back and they've become trees, the children were still standing on each other, and so they collapsed, with one of the children landing in the river. At this point, you can either walk into the water and pull the kid-tree into the shallows, or go on with your business. Once the plot's moved on and the people are restored to human form, the child will thank you and give you a little reward. It doesn't take much effort to save her, and the reward is small. However, if you don't save her, the other two children she was playing with will mope around and give heartrendingly sad statements about the fate of their friend. That alone is enough to make you want to restart...

In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, a trading sequence which ultimately unlocks a bonus dungeon begins with rescuing an injured penguin from a ledge where she stranded herself.

In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, an elderly NPC couple in Kaocho asks you to take a letter to their daughter in Tonfon. She asks you to take a care package back to them. By this time, Kaocho has been destroyed and all its citizens killed by the Grave Eclipse. You complete this sequence by having Sveta use Spirit Sense to communicate with the dead elders and show them their daughter's gift so they can find peace.

Shin Megami Tensei has this with the demon negotiation system. If you encounter a demon who has a same-species already in your party, you can talk your way out of doing battle with them, which spares the lives of both you and the demon and in some cases rewards you with an item, HP and MP restoration, or Macca. So you just recruited one of the cute little Jack Frosts, and you encounter a wave with another one of them...forget battle, they're too adorable to kill!

In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey's fifth sector, you'll occasionally find comrades, Jimenez included, who have fallen asleep due to sleep floors. You can kick them awake, which tends to reward you with an item.

Some demons will actually beg for their lives if you beat them within an inch of it. It's surprisingly satisfying to have something like a giant snake demon thank you for sparing him, or even join you out of appreciation.

Near the end of Bastion, the player is given the opportunity to save Zulf, rather than leaving him to die. If you choose the first option, the Ura become so impressed with your Determinator status that they back down and let both of you leave alive.

There's a lot you can do in Planescape: Torment to fulfill this trope, from helping a terrified and mentally shattered woman find her way home after decades of searching to helping a shy guard and a lonely but cheerful woman come together. But what really deserves special mention is playing the very end of the game several times until you figure out how you can save all of your dead companions.

Not to mention that it gets a lot harder to let your character "die" frivolously once you've played the game to the end and know the true cost of each of The Nameless One's averted deaths.

It's also possible to go above and beyond with Dak'kon's therapy and not only completely restore his self-confidence and courage but make him even stronger than he was before his city was destroyed. Unfortunately, it's next to impossible because it's so buggy and counterintuitive and it's unfinished in the unmodded game anyway.

Kingdom Hearts 3D has the Dream Eaters, colorful creatures who fight alongside Sora and Riku as they venture through the sleeping worlds. Not only you can you name them, pet them, change their colors, and play training games with them — the higher their affinity for you is, the stronger they are. Alternatively, you can just kill them off and harvest their Dream Fragments to make better Dream Eaters with. Monster.

There's also the Bird Men in Magicant. If you get one of them killed on your way to the Sea of Eden, another one will gladly join your side if you go back to their house. However, there's a marked grave just outside of the house for every one of them you let die.

In the Suikoden series, sometimes your characters can die for real, be it in a cinematic event or a less-dramatic death on the battlefield. Either way, you do feel lousy for the death of your characters, which are sometimes friends with your other characters, or even family. It also doesn't help that many of the best endings and secrets are unlocked by making it to the end of the game with all 108 characters alive.

Certain characters will die outside of your control in final stages of each game. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it; their deaths are part of the ending. But despite the sheer number of characters, the games tend to make you care enough about them that it's still a Player Punch.

In Tales from My D&D Campaign, the first major plot arc is the party trying to retrieve the three Spoons Of Plenty, powerful artifact versions of Sustaining Spoons. Normal Sustaining Spoons can make enough bland (but nutritious) gruel to feed six people a day, but the only limit on how many times you can use the Spoons Of Plenty is the amount of time it takes to activate them for each bowl. In Episode 18, the party finally delivers them to the government of Vistria, a human kingdom overrun with refugees after the evil Kua-Toa conquered the adjacent human kingdom of Verandi. By Episode 20, the spoons are in full swing, and are lifting twenty-five thousand war refugees out of borderline starvation. Especially sweet for Draven, whose ancestors were among those refugees.

Many quest characters remain in your village after they stop being important, so you can keep them with you until the end. If you keep track of names, it's possible to watch over specific villagers throughout their entire lives and take them with you into new lands, even as their age and infirmity makes it harder and harder to forestall the inevitable.

No matter how much of a monster you are, your creature always loves you and believes the best of you. You can pet it until it turns into a puddle of happy goo, decorate its pen with things it likes, and teach it to become a beloved guardian of the villagers.

Dwarf Fortress names every single one of your dwarves, all the elves, all the humans etc. It also names monsters and animals that kill things, which can lead to situations like having a giant bat called "Bridgebane the Hammer of Pacifism". And who wouldn't want to keep a bat with a name like that alive?

The guy who lost half his military to the damn thing. The "batman" creatures (according to the DF Wiki, they CAN breathe in space) are often assigned names because your dwarves feel like it, and are far better for the purposes of this trope because they didn't get that name by butchering your dwarves.

This happens because your dwarves have favorite animals. A fortress with a dwarf who likes a certain type of anthrocreature will end up with every member of a tribe of, for instance, slug men each having unique names.

Nor the detailed relationships between all your dwarves with spouses, children, lovers, friends, acquaintances, enemies, and several levels between.

Add to that making personality a factor in behavior — an irritable noble who demands crap you can't produce gets sent quickly to the killing chambers, a laid back noble who requests things you're producing anyway is an unexpected gift.

Your original 7 dwarves work so hard to get your fortress off the ground. It's not fun when one of them dies, especially if it's a particularly stupid death. (Which is unfortunately very easy to accomplish.)

There is a notable gameplay aspect to this tendency in DF. Even if you don't particularly care about a given entity in the game, your dwarves do. If your dwarf's pet or family member or close friend dies, they can get very upset.

All of which lead to some of the most creative Video Game Cruelty Potential as the player tries to build the most inventively vicious deathtraps possible to turn goblin sieges into paste. Or even better, catch them all in cages and let your happy little dwarves use them for sparring practice. Especially once you've lost a few favorite dwarves to the goblins. When everything wants to kill your beloved dwarves, a bit of Papa Wolf savagery is in order, after all.

This DF fan comic has a player caring too much about an enemy kobold to have his dwarves stop it from stealing from him.

Just try not to feel any affection for your fake spouse and child in Harvest Moon. Even after every Scripted Event has been shown and there is nothing left to do, it is near impossible to stop playing thanks to the Playable Epilogue.

If you played any Harvest Moon game, it's a good bet that you have been in a panic about finding some random citizen's birthday, and saying a prayer that they like the Radish that you didn't sell specially to give to them! And let's not even mention your animals (Everyone else panicked and brought their dog in at the chance of rain, right?)

Sometimes, Videogame Caring Potential breeds itself, in that in some games your dog likes you more for holding it when you go to sleep. If you always let your pet sleep on your bed anyway, there's no chance of leaving it out in a storm in the first place.

Also played straight in Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. In an innovative, if sometimes frustrating twist, you do not have direct control over your troops; rather, you are the sovereign of the land, and you hire heroes and they wander about questing on their own. It's like a more interactive version of Progress Quest, really. With nifty sprite graphics. If you want something attacked, either wait for the hero to wander by it, which will cause other heroes to hear the sounds of battle and join in; build a guard tower close by to direct your free guardsmen there; or place a bounty on the object and they will attack until either they destroy the object (for example, the elven buildings in the abducted prince quest) or pick it up and bring it home (for example, the titular items in the "Bell, Book, and Candle" quest).

In the iPhone game Pocket God, you control a small tribe on an island. You can kill them in various horrible ways (feeding them swordfish, drowning them etc), but you can also set the sky to sunset and the little looks of wonder on their faces is possibly the cutest thing ever. You can also light a fire, make it night-time, and watch them all curl up in a group to sleep like they didn't just spend all day getting attacked by dinosaurs and ice monsters.

Heck, even Something Awful was so damn proud of their adoptive brat by the end of it. Helps that she ended up becoming an Enfante Terrible who not only commits regicide but ends up usurping Satan.

The Sims is both this and cruelty potential, depending on the kind of player you are.

Alice And Kev is an example of just how powerful this can be in The Sims.

A creepypasta actually shows this too. A ghost of a child who was abused in his life and died in a housefire uses the game as a second chance at life, and the player grants it to him upon seeing the state that he was in when he played the family.

The Sims Medieval balances this and cruelty potential just as the main series does. While you will die if you're too mean and don't complete necessary tasks, the amount you can do to care for your hero sims, their families and even the random civilians caters to this trope. The fact that murder, plague, alcoholism, political tension, etc mean that Sims can have worse problems than in the main games just makes you care for your kingdom more. Notable moments include finding a giant crab-man and befriending it, finding a lost child and freeing a genie.

Though not strictly a video game, Vocaloid is a brilliant demonstration of this principle. Think about it: It's a digital voice simulator built on samples of a voice actor or actress' donated data, each with a cute anime-style mascot character, but with no explicit personality. After you've listened to those characters sing, it's hard not to think of them as people and even have incredible loyalty to the programs you use the most.

In Choice of Broadsides, you can become good friends (and even lovers if you take the Gay Option!) with Villeneuve, an honorable pirate. If you do so and have high enough combat skills, you can choose to merely disarm him/her instead of outright killing him/her, upon which he/she will surrender voluntarily and say that if he/she has to give up his/her ship, at least it's to you. Tends to be much more satisfying than just offing him/her.

Monster Rancher has plenty of this as you work your Mons up to tournament champions. Doubly so if it's a game where they can die.

Caring for cute little lambs, ducklings, and puppies is one of the reasons Farmville is so popular.

Animal Crossing can bring this up, seeing as it's basically a neighborhood simulator. You can easily get attached to your villagers, who are all cute, colorfulanimals that you can befriend and snuggy wuggy woogy wub. It can be extremely heartbreaking if one moves away because of your neighbor limit. Sometimes, neighbors will move to friends' towns. This can potentially cause an estranged relationship with that real-life friend.

My Little Pony: Friendship Gardens runs off this. You create your own Little Pony and can feed her apples, play games with her, brush her hair, teach her how to jump, and generally keep her happy — and then, in the end, let her go free.

The H-GameVisual NovelLife with a Slave: Teaching Feeling is literally "Video Game Caring Potential: The Game". You play as a small city doctor who one day is visited by a wandering merchant whose life you had once saved who has come to repay his debt to you. He entrusts you with a small, horrifically abused former slave girl called Sylvie whose former master (now deceased) used to torture her daily for fun, leaving her with grotesque acid burns all over her body. The entire focus of the game is caring for her, repairing her damaged psyche with kindness, compassion and head pats and, as the name suggests, teaching her to feel again, until she learns to be happy, hopeful and eventually fall in love with you. It's in fact mandatory to treat her this way as, although you start out being given options to treat her poorly, or even rape her right off the bat, these are all traps as treating her in any way other than pure kindness will lead to her unavoidably catching a coldand dyingnote This can lead to the almost laughably tragic scenario where she dies because you bought her sandwiches for lunch when you took her to the restaurant rather than pancakes. It's also worth noting that, although the game is a hardcore eroge with a big emphasis on sexual content (once you reach the stage where she's both willing and able to freely consent to it), there are several people who have reportedly played it by actually rejecting her advances, skipping all the sexual content, getting Sylvie to call them "Daddy" and raising her as their daughter, because she's just thatMoe.note Later versions have even acknowledged this, as when you get to the stage where you can choose to choose something else for Sylvie to call you other than "Master", if you put in something like "Daddy" or "Papa" she'll wonder aloud whether this means you think of her like a daughter.

With a later update, you can also start teaching her medicine and turn her into your assistant, complete with white (or black or pink) nurse outfit and she will smile in return for you giving her a purpose in life. Heartwarming doesn't being to describe it.

You'll occasionally come across a migrant who lacks the proper paperwork, but has an important reason to immigrate to your country (their husband got in, they need back surgery only available in your country, etc.). You can grant them access. Just be prepared for a citation.

Early on, a sex worker will leave you a note telling you that she is worried about another man in line who wants to force her into slavery. If you want, you can detain him. Better still, doing so does not lead to a citation.

Halfway through the game, a guard asks you for a favor: a girl he met while serving abroad is coming over, and he really wants you to let her in. You can grant him his request, but you will be cited.

Late in the game: your sister is arrested, and her daughter is put up for adoption. Taking her in means one more mouth to feed, but at the very least you'll be given your sister's savings.

Space Combat

Brilliantly done in the Homeworld series. Each part has a single moment where extra efforts aimed at saving people are more or less optional and are without material reward of any kind but are extremely compelling and self-satisfactory:

In the first game you return home after a hyperdrive test run only to find your planet in flames and the Taiidan destroying the cryo trays with the last remnants of your race. One of the trays is already damaged by the time you arrive, and in a "normal" course of events the invaders will destroy it before you can destroy them. There is no reprimand for that and no bonuses for saving the tray, but, goddammit, there are a hundred thousand people, your people, in it!

In the semi-sequel, Cataclysm, you encounter a civilian convoy under attack by nanovirus delivery missiles. Here extra lengths to protect the transports are more or less justified from the pragmatic point of view, since each converted transport starts launching missiles itself, and once the enemy runs out of clean transports it turns on you. Still you can't help but feel a moral obligation to protect as many transports as possible. Especially once you hear the screams of a ship's crew being "converted" and realise just how many people are supposed to be in there...

The finale of Homeworld 2 repeats the tragedy that destroyed Kharak over Hiigara when three Progenitor weapon platforms start barraging the surface of Hiigara with atmospheric deprivation warheads. Intercepting every rocket is a quite difficult as it must be done manually and you'll have to constantly switch between the tactical screen, where the rockets are visible, and the game screen, where all the fighting takes place, but these inconveniences are completely blotted out by a single thought: "Not a single rocket must reach the surface. You hear me? NOT A SINGLE ONE!!!"

In Star Trek: Bridge Commander, you encounter a vessel belonging to the enemy who, during a large firefight, has kept out of battle with their shields down. Your crew makes note of it before it turns away and warps out. You encounter the same ship later, guarding your objective, but again, with its shields down and making no effort to attack you. This is where you ought to slow down, take a breath, and think, "What Would Captain Picard Do?" Open hailing frequencies. The result is gaining a new ally and making the last level much easier (the alien ship will accompany you on your final run, and if he's with you then a big chunk of the enemy fleet will ignore you), your sector admiral giving you huge glowing praise, more detail about what's going on with the plot, and the satisfaction that Gene Roddenberry's view of the universe is still alive and well, even in an action game.

Starlancer, a space fighter from the makers of Wing Commander, has an entire squadron of Red Shirt wingmen, none of whom are actually useful in battle and tend to ram things to death (their own). But...they each have their own backstory in the game's information system, like the petite blonde girl who joined the Navy Fighter Corps after being a star in a barnstorming show...in space. Or the bitter little Frenchman, or the black-market dealing Scot, or the sultry Italian chick...the list goes on. Also, when they die, they die screaming in a truly disturbing manner.

Also, in Wing Commander III, on the later missions where Anyone Can Die comes into play. There's a reason you can take fewer wingmen along the final stretch You get the single ending if you picked the pilot as your love interest and bring her along- all wingmen die at some point along that series of missions. However, if you bring Maniac along, he actually listens, sometimes, and becomes a little more competent, so he's not as bad a choice.

FTL: Faster Than Light, there's nothing stopping you from being as caring as possible to your crew, especially denying events that result in crew loss (or using blue options to circumvent them) to the point there's an achievement called "No Red Shirts Here". It's also caring to choose the more caring decisions such as letting enemies surrender, freeing slaves to join your crew, and one event has an Engi ship mistake you for a pirate and offers to transfer goods for it's survival. If you explain you're friendly, it either gets underway without saying anything or gives you the goods anyways for realizing you need every scrap of help you can get.

In the finale for Star Fox Zero, James flies right on in during the end sequence to deal with Andross, who is chasing Fox out of the dimensional hole in one last attempt at revenge for his soon-to-be death. You can choose to keep on flying... or, as Andross' head turns around to deal with James, you can pop a U-turn for one last (fully-charged) parting shot.

James: "You've become so strong, Fox..."

Stealth-Based Game

In general, stealth games are the most likely for players to attempt a Pacifist Run in, due to the standards of the genre discouraging direct combat anyways.

Beginning with Sons of Liberty, every game can be completed without killing a single soul, with the exception of exactly one character in Snake Eater: the final boss, The Boss, who must be executed, though there are a few very rare occasions where Snake guns down some mooks in cutscenes. The player is even encouraged not to kill enemies, with the best codenames requiring zero kills. And as all of the mooks are (usually) Just Following Orders and bear no real malevolence towards anyone, why would you want to kill them?

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory definitely qualifies with the American pilots during the Seoul mission. Downed extracting data that could potentially spark World War Three, Fisher finds the jet being watched by Korean forces and is ordered to immediately call in an airstrike before another party can acquire it. Sam objects as the unconsious pilots ejected too late and are within lethal range, and is shouted down by Lambert, but players can go out of their way to and risk death to save them:

Lambert: Fisher! If you compromise this mission for those men— Fisher: Save it, Irving. You gave me my orders already. [...] Lambert: Alright Fisher, good job. He should be safe from the blast here, designate the wreckage with your EEV. [...] Lambert: Sam, you need to designate the— Fisher: No point rescuing one and leaving the other. Lambert: You don't even exist, Fisher. You can't get a medal for this. Fisher: Medals don't help me sleep at night, Lambert.

The non-lethal runs of Dishonored always have better endings for Corvo, Emily, and Dunwall than if you run around killing everyone you meet. This is seen most of all through Emily's actions towards you - in low chaos, her drawings will show Corvo maskless, labeled "Daddy", while the same drawings in high chaos will feature masked Corvo brutally killing people.

Strategy

In the later Advance Wars games, troops now get "Veteran" statuses etc. for defeating troops- making individual units theoretically more unique. This was done to discourage the Infantry Spam tactics from previous games. Unfortunately, with the boosts so meager for the unit's usual unlikeliness to survive for much longer, it doesn't work very well.

Game Boy Wars 3, on the other hand, has Materials in addition to the standard Gold for building units. The price gaps with Materials are much smaller in the game than the ones with money in other installments—and with the Gold price gaps being outright immense in Game Boy Wars 3, this does mean infantry spam is weakened, as replacing units is punished, and just repairing them could easily deny you better units. Good thing too, because enemy units are weakened when adjacent to multiple units.

As if the EXP system (which was also in Super Famicom Wars) wasn't enough, eh? Add unit promotion in GBW3 and there's plenty of reason to stay alive.

The latest Advance Wars also changed how the Technique-rating was calculated. Before, you could spam units towards the end of the game to make your survival look good, but that actually lowers it in the new one. Now, the best strategy is to let many of them live.

The method of calculating tries to anyway. Unfortunately, it fails spectacularly the way the formula is handled.

None of the above have anything on Arrangement in Campaign mode of Game Boy Wars 3. In Campaign, completing a map puts your surviving units in the reserves and then on a subsequent map, Arrangement will let you send out a unit, with its Experience retained, on an allowed property near your HQ, and you don't have to pay anything for it, just the property's liberty for the turn. You can even promote certain units before putting them out on the field if they are at S Rank. Obviously, the key to succeeding in Campaign would be to plan out your units so as to deal with any possible situation, and concentrate on keeping them alive.

Battalion Wars does the same thing by making everything adorable. The first time you take control of a tank and a grunt quietly goes "Take good care of her, sir" may make you go "aww". The trouble starts when you realize that the opposing forces are just as cute, and they have accents.

Nectaris gives units from 1-9 xp, they earn one for an attack, one extra for attacking with no losses, and of course each xp slightly boosts all combat-related stats. Much like Myth, however, you only get what you have, instead factories are for repairing units that aren't totally destroyed.

Battle for Wesnoth turns this up to 11. Not only can you recall units from previous scenarios in the campaign modes, but they also have quasi-unique names and randomized traits such as "Swift" and "Intelligent" which give them certain bonuses. There just has to be at least 1 guy out there who has mourned the death of a unit.

Helped by the fact that units can gain experience and level up not unlike RPG characters, which comes into play especially in campaign mode where they take that experience with them from one scenario to the next. A higher-level unit that you've worked to get to that point is naturally easier to feel invested in than just another random new recruit (while on the other hand any such new recruit has at least the potential to get to that point itself in turn...).

In all iterations Civilization starting with III (including the console game Revolutions), the "Cultural Victory" path rewards you for building an enlightened Democracy with Cathedrals and Universities to contrast your cruel and warlike Communist neighbors. It makes you go all warm and fuzzy inside to see neighboring cities defect en masse and welcome those poor, oppressed people into your civilization.

Also your subjects will occasionally throw "We Love the King/Queen Day" celebrations in your honor, complete with fireworks. It's good to see them acknowledge how great you are

In Civilization II (at least; might also be present in some of the others), "We Love the X Days" give celebrating cities some kind of bonus. Usually this is the resource-gathering potential of the next-best government form, but Republics and Democracies, as the top-tier govs, instead give the city in question an additional population point every turn. This effectively turned those two government forms into a kind of Game-Breaker for experienced players. Like they weren't already.

Democratic-type governments in general are the "grow and make money like crazy" systems in all Civilization-type games.

In II and III they give a direct boost to the economy by boosting Trade/Commerce.

In Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (Civilizationin space), Democratic Politics gives a boost to Growth and Efficiency, which you can combine with Knowledge Values and Cybernetic Future Society to achieve a Paradigm Economy (i.e. maximum Efficiency) with pretty much every faction (even the PeacekeepingForces), meaning you can run a very large empire with far less money lost to corruption than under any other system, or combine with Planned Economics and Eudaimonic Future Society (which is basically Videogame Caring Potential in the form of a Social Engineering option) to get to a state of Population Boom (i.e. maximum Growth), which is a Game-Breaker. (The direct boost to income is provided by Free Market Economics.)

In AC, you can build an enlightened democracy with peace and justice for all, cultivate your talent pool, adopt environmentalist economics and build Centauri Preserves. Enjoy a string of Golden Ages and wealth and productivity coming out your ears; Planet may even thank your kindness by sending an army of mind worms to protect your new society.

There's also "Interlude 6 : despair", which the player receives if his first mindworm unit is killed, along with its commander, who's a friend and pupil. "For all the gene splicing and longevity treatments, all the manmade miracles of [your faction], death remains as final, as capricious, and as desolate as it has ever been. No matter what happens now, no matter what journey of wonder humankind now embarks upon, [name] will never see it, never know the end of it. And no matter how many centuries you continue to cheat eternity, you will never again have the company of your student and friend. And you cannot cheat eternity forever." Makes you want to just keep it far from any real battle.

In that prompt, you are directed to conquer one of the cities of the faction that killed your protege. When you conquer it, it is automatically renamed "[name]'s Rest"

In IV, Representation increases Research and Happiness in large cities, and Universal Suffrage increases the amount of money produced by Towns (the direct boost to income is provided by Free Trade economics).

The downside to all of these, however, is that they all reduce your ability to support troops and make war. On the other hand, starting with Civilization III, you support your troops and make war by direct expenditure of money from the treasury. When you're turning a large surplus already, building a large army just makes your surplus smaller.

Early combat units that have accrued a ton of combat veterancy may apply for this. The unruly band of warriors you start off with may go on to fight dozens of battles, eventually going on to become some of the finest formations under your control, having fought for hundreds of years against your civilization's foes. (A land "unit" in Civilization is approximately equivalent to a division, or maybe a brigade or regiment depending on era and which iteration of the game we're talking about.)

Dominions 3 has both named commanders and generic ordinary units, each represented by individual sprites on the battlefield. Watching enemy heavy cavalry ride down my troops (complete with individual screams), or seeing a veteran commander fall victim to assassination (or worse, disease, which causes them to lose 1 HP a turn until they die), made it -very- satisfying to utterly annihilate the enemy gods responsible.

This is exacerbated by the popular supercombatant strategy, where one goes through the process of summoning a select commander, loading them up with hand picked magical items, and sending them off to war. Seeing these guys on the receiving end of a well made trap is just depressing.

In EndWar, you are given a persistent battalion that you upgrade and improve, with unique callsigns, consistent voices in response to your orders (including sounds of abject panic that convey the fact that they're getting ripped apart much better than the dispassionate voice of your XO saying they're getting hammered), and carried over experience... if they stay alive. While a defeated unit will be evacuated if possible, it's still possible for an enemy to kill them entirely. It eventually hits the point where you can get paranoid about using WMDs for fear that the enemy will kill your units with a reprisal. It eventually becomes a fairly major point of Heartwarming when you hear them say they won't let you down, and worrying when they yell for evac or support, and an outright kick in the teeth when their unit card glows with the skull and crossbones that says that the unit is dead instead of evacuated.

The Jagged Alliance series always penalizes you if you let too many of your hires die. If named characters lack a proper burial (say, you dumped the body in a river instead of securing the area in order to transport it out) then your reputation will plummet and only the will-work-for-anyone dregs will join you. For generic guards, if too many die it will be harder or more expensive to secure their replacements.

If you help the local villagers (instead of trying to use them as meat shields), your reputation in the town (which affects a town tax-rate stat) won't plummet.

The actual voice clips of characters when they refuse to work for you, or when they're already working for you and think you're an asshole, just serves to ram it home for how big of a screw-up Jerk Ass you are. Now, in Jagged Alliance 2, hire Raven and her husband, Raider. Have one die. How big of a jerk are you? The survivor will let you know all. The. Time.

Medieval 2: Total War encourages the player to be a jerk since gaining money is much easier when being evil. Being a chivalrous general has benefits since you gain a morale boost for your men when fighting the enemy which means they are less likely to rout, while dread bonuses for ruling towns have at times a negative effect on the population. Sadly, most people opt for the crueler option most of the time.

All Total War games have an experience mechanic for units, which encourages some players (those that don't just rely on Human Wave tactics) to try to keep their own armies' casualties to a minimum.

This can overlap with Video Game Cruelty Potential. "Hmm, the enemy are making their last stand in the city center, but I don't want to lose any more men finishing them off..." So what do you do? Wheel a crude cannon into place and go bowling. Or, if you're taking a castle and the last enemy units are all cavalry, get your archers on the walls of the keep and just execute the helpless horsemen with direct-fire arrow volleys.

It is actually ill-advised to do so if you're settling down for a long war, something which is especially likely in the limited-nations expansions. A high command, high morale general, with high valour high morale peasants? Those spearmen and militias are about to get chewed.

You should care for your generals and Royal family in all Total War games because the more battles they win the better they become at war, the more likely they are to win if you auto-battle and of course the men are less likely to run from the battle. Oh and at least in Medieval if you lose (or kill your enemies) all your generals and family then you get a non-standard game over.

The trait system in general can foster this trope, as it has the effect of making your generals and agents come across like real people.

Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth 2: Soulblighter were some of the first strategy games to have veterans systems. The more kills a unit got the faster it would attack and the more damage it would deal. And since you don't start out with many units to begin with and are always outnumbered quite a bit, you do everything you can to make sure they stay alive.

Ogre Battle has several special characters that you can draw into your ranks as you move through the game. Some of them are likable characters and you can feel like crap for getting them killed. Even the generic characters make your heart wrench when they fall in battle. Although, this can be because you spent countless hours leveling them to reach a certain class and you hard work just died out.

Original War is built around this trope. Every human unit in the game is a unique individual with RPG-like stats, and when they die, they are Killed Off for Real. It is often better to deploy inferior remote-controlled or computer-controlled vehicles just to avoid risking your precious soldiers. (Honestly this is a lot like the use of military robots in Real Life.)

Played straight in the Warcraft clone/superior cousin War Wind, where veteran units may be kept until the next stage for a minor pre-game boost. You may even keep the 'epic' units with you, though most of the time you'll want something faster, or you'll want to bring an extra artisan for resource/build tier boosts.

In Halo Wars, it is common to become attached to units with stars, to the extent of not actually using them for fear of their deaths. Especially your starting scout unit.

Somewhat averted in CDV games, notably the Conquest series. Despite almost EVERY SINGLE UNIT having its own experience, morale, and even phobias! American Conquest is especially bad for this, as human wave tactics are pretty much the only way to take a fort due to the sheer number of defences. See, even though you have all these stats, non-hero units tend to take damage like the squishy pink fleshlings that they are... Just created or alive since the start of the battle, a few shots from a musket will ruin any militia or trapper's day. The damage indicator is more an indicator of how accurate their weapons are, as you may see if you watch the spot of the impact graphic closely. Bullet impacts seem to deal percents, not numerical, while high health only really helps in melee. Also, cannonballs can mow through troops ridiculously accurate for their time period. One of the largest reasons behind the human wave requirement is how deadly fort cannons can be.

In Fire Emblem EVERY character you control is named and has their own head-shot. Add to the mix a bit of Killed Off for Real (minus restarting the game), specific endings for every character, and lots of character interaction, you wind up with players wanting to restart every level multiple times so that no one ever dies.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon introduced a system whereupon the game will provide your army with generic units if your numbers get too low, and secret chapters only accessible if you have below certain numbers of units, finally providing players with the perfect opportunity to take the pain of resetting in earlier games out on their army... yet the overall tendency of players is still often to reset on every death.

The amount of self-inflicted butchery needed to hit the secret chapters is something that won't occur naturally to most players. This is especially true for those who played the earlier games, and thus have been taught by experience that losing a unit is a bad, bad thing. In fact, most guides and FAQs for the game strongly urge you to do a separate play-through to see the secret chapters.

Games of the series that have a relationship system inspire this in additional ways; you will want your characters to live so that you can see through their own little story arcs.

Fire Emblem Awakening takes this to a whole new level with the ability to marry off your party members and even recruit their children, sent to the past through the time stream. We need to emphasize this point: your characters are a very tightly-knit Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. They have multiple friendship and romance options, they all have their little quirks, they're all quite likeable, and you'll have more than your fair share of laughs and smiles at their antics. You'll even find yourself feeling happy for them when they actually get hitched, specially with how romantic and/or Adorkable some of them are. You can get married, and your spouse gets their own special confession scene, complete with special artwork and a voiced line to seal the deal. This leads you to being able to recruit your very ownchild from the future, who absolutely, unabashedly adores you to death. Bonus points if you married a character who has a child of their own, which means you get Morgan a loving older sibling. More bonus points if you proceed to marry these new units between members of their little group, which results in entire families joining together into one largeBadass Family. Even MORE bonus points once you take into account just how muchsaid unitshave had to go throughin order to get to this point, and then you only feel the need to protect them even more. What's more, if they die, entire families will end up hearbroken. And since you're the Tactician, it means that if their families end up broken, it's all your fault. If ever a game designer wanted to make the player truly love and care for their units, and make them feel like complete assholes if they failed to keep them alive, this game is an excellent example of when they succeed espectacularly.

And because it just needs to be said — you will grow to care for Maria and Meria, who are both built up as incredibly lovable, sympathetic characters. Their inevitably miserable fates lead some players to deliberately miss finding Ancardia in Maria's route so as to let her live her life as herself and save her from becoming a Fallen Hero later on in Dept. Heaven continuity, even if you yourself won't be there to take care of her for much longer.

Probably because this is what Meria wants most, there's no way to get it for her. Thanks, Sting.

In Raiden Fighters, one of the stages has a tank boss firing at houses before proceeding to attack you. If you use your Attack Drones or bombs to block its shots, you'll get a "DEFENDED THE HOUSE!" bonus. Raiden Fighters 2 has a similar bonus involving defending friendly tanks from a medium-sized enemy tank.

Men of War is likely the best WWII RTS for caring potential. Let's review: All soldiers have their own names and inventories. The ability to loot gear off the dead means that a bit of effort makes soldiers much more effective. The ability to loot hats off the dead means personal touches. The AI is helpful beyond contemporary standards, e.g. when an enemy tank rounds a corner, a soldier throws an AP grenade, takes cover in the opposite direction, and tends his wounds. A lack of hand-holding means room for crazy plans. The option to switch to FPS controls for individual soldiers means opportunities for death-defying heroism. A fairly interactive environment means, for example, removing weapons from disabled tanks and adding them to the defensive lines, or some fool driving through a battlefield on a hijacked tractor, hauling machine guns and ammo. Playing the game means sending these people to die by the hundreds. Ladies and gentlemen, video games as a learning tool.

Mount & Blade: Your army is comprised entirely of recruits which are rather unique from one another, all of which are trained up by you to be powerful and fearless soldiers. It is not uncommon for even the largest player armies to have a troop that is the "odd one out", either by being a neutral faction troop that you rescued from another lord's captivity or the last survivor of a recruitment run you made while in another faction's borders. It is not uncommon for that specific soldier to survive months worth of fighting under your command only to be unceremoniously listed on the casualty report after a skirmish.

Total Annihilation: Kingdoms gives units bronze, silver, and gold ranks as they rack up kills. And, after awhile, you grow attached to them, to the point where one may send out their whole army of flying dragons of doom to incinerate the enemy if they dare to kill your 'pet'

In X-COM, it is extremely hard not to get attached to a few of your veteran soldiers. Sadly, since Anyone Can Die, your favorites will almost inevitably be killed off unless you keep them stationed on the dropship or your base by a blaster bomb into the dropship or an attack on your base.

You'll also become attached to your veterans because the rookies are so useless that soldiers who can shoot straight are worth their weight in Elerium.

In Sacrifice there are certain missions that reward you for doing good deeds. In one mission where your sent to slay a powerful dragon that's under the control of another wizard; if you spare her and defeat the wizard, the dragon goes with you throughout the game, meaning you get a high tier unit in the earliest part of the game.

In Monkey Go Happy, you're tasked with making a cute, crying monkey happy on each level. It's hard not to feel for the little guy, sitting there crying and trembling. The sequels take it further, adding a second, smaller monkey in the second game, and a baby monkey in the third.

The Game of Thrones mod for CK II allows you to keep the Starks together during the War of the Five Kings. It's difficult, but most players will want to give it a go.

Because of the way scoring works in the standard multiplayer modes, Wargame: European Escalation and its sequel Wargame: AirLand Battle encourage you to preserve the lives of your soldiers in a somewhat underhanded way: The player gets points for killing the enemy's units, but the enemy gets points for killing the player's, units, too. So a player that spends the lives of his/her men like water in a Zerg Rush early on to take all the objectives will often still wind up losing to a more conservative player who only managed to hold onto one part of the map but kept all his units alive while defending it. Troops also function better with higher morale, encouraging you to keep them from getting too beat up. When you do find yourself having to sacrifice a unit for the sake of victory, it eats at your heart a little every time.

Not to mention that, in Campaign mode, when you lose a unit, they're gone. For good. Irreplacably. That means that losing certain units early in-game will cost you an advantage (if not victory) at some point in the future.

In Planet Blupi, you can keep the Blupis energized by feeding them tomatoes and cure the sick ones by giving them medicine. Returning lost Blupis to their home also counts.

You'll come to care for your various Mechwarriors in the Mech Commander games. Each one is uniquely portrayed by a real actor and each has their own personality. Spend enough time with them and you'll grow to appreciate their individual quirks, such as Baron's lovable smugness, Siren's eternal cheerfulness, or Twitch's jittery neuroses. Many players also do their best to hold on to their early pilots, since even rookies can eventually grow into capable warriors, and it's hard not to get attached to someone who's been with you since your first mission together.

Survivors all have randomly generated names and appearances and individual stats that grow over time. Naturally, losing one is a big blow to your efficiency (and some deaths are unavoidable if you want certain endings).

Gustave is a trader who visits once a week to trade valuable items for food (or give you food if you're starving), gamble, or advertise his Love Caravan's services. At one point he'll offer a job in said caravan to one of your female survivors (she isn't happy about it, but if it's what everyone wants...). Agreeing will get you a rocket launcher and a lingering sensation that the zombies are better people than you.

While the biggest draw of Super Robot Wars is its Fanservice-filled Massive Multiplayer Crossover nature, but there's also the major Fix Fic aspect, as Banpresto allows players to save characters who died in their original seriesnote Unless their death is too integral to the plot; for example, Kamina always dies because it's necessary for Simon's development, or to induce Heel Face Turns in redeemable antagonists and turn them into heroes. While sometimes it happens automatically as a consequence of the plot, other times it requires conscious effort, usually in the form of protecting the character in question in battle or by having your team talk them through their problems. Hang around any forum that discusses mecha anime, and you'll find at least one person saying things like "I can't wait until this show gets into SRW so I can save him/her!"

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